Due to the current Covid-19 lockdown we’re unable to hold our usual Anzac Day Service this year. We’ve taken the opportunity to look back on ANZAC services of the past and to provide some
On Anzac Day each year a mid-morning commemorative service is held in Maida Vale Road, in front of the memorial at the gates of Roseneath School. The gathering is led by the vicar and congregation of St Barnabas Church, Roseneath Residents Association and Roseneath School staff and pupils. A sizeable crowd gathers for a prayer, a poem, a bugle call, and to hear names of fallen soldiers read from the inscription panels. A family member or a school pupil places a poppy for each soldier on the steps of the memorial. A display of historical materials inside the church is open for viewing and each year newly researched profiles may be added, as families or school pupils have learned more detail about individual soldiers. Following that service, The Long Hall, down the drive and out onto the northern tip of Point Jerningham, hosts an informal gathering where those who wish can share personal memories, music and stories of their own experiences shaped by wartimes.
The hall, a double barracks ex-Army building, was erected on the site in 1947–48 as clubrooms of the Roseneath–Oriental Bay chapter of the Returned Services’ Association. After some decades the hall became the practice rooms for the Pipes & Drums of the City of Wellington. More recently a trust was formed to oversee the restoration of the somewhat dilapidated building, renamed The Long Hall. (Trustees are Edith Campbell, Barbara Lyon, Keith McEwing, Jennifer Shennan, with co-patrons Fiona Kidman and Robert Oliver.) Thanks to much appreciated support of grants from The Stout Trust, guidance by Richard Sharpe of Beca, conservation architect David Kernohan, engineer Andrew Charleson, and the work of resourceful builders Giles Kidman and Sascha Wassong and painter Daniel Beban, the building has a new lease of life and a range of community / recreational / educational activities take place there. It always seemed to us fair enough to restore what the returned soldiers had no doubt seen as their post-war peace-time project. Waiherere, original name for the headland, the site of a fortified lookout, means swiftly tumbling waters, waterfall.
The gathering each Anzac Day has a lone bagpiper playing on the hillside — Hugo Manson pipes us down the path. Inside the hall, other music might include Bill Wallace on harmonica, or Joe Shanahan on piano (he played for the RSA socials in this hall in the 1950s). Stalwart local Roger Wilson can always be relied upon to bring levity to his introductory tales before singing, and Robert Oliver invites community participation in his choice of songs.
A reading of one of the children’s books by Jennifer Beck / Scholastic Press always makes poignant impact — The Bantam and the Soldier, The Duck and the Gun, The Anzac Violin, Stefania’s Dancing Slippers. Other readings — of poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Murray, John Fergus, Bill Manhire or Fiona Kidman bring a mixture of memory and resilience, though always with a sense of the loss and waste that all wars inevitably involve.
Each year an invited speaker talks on some aspect of war-related studies, community or family experiences — Gerard Crewdson, whose father was secretary of the RSA committee from its earliest years; Chris Bourke on his researches into the music of World War I; Jane Tolerton on the roles of women in wartime; Chris Szekely on a visit to Gallipoli; Russell Beban reporting on his family’s experience with the NZDF’s Te Auraki repatriation project; Adam Manterys on the arrival in New Zealand in 1944 of 733 Polish orphaned children as wartime refugees who have stayed on these 75 year since the SS General Randell docked just across the harbour there. Others attending the gathering may have a family story to tell. That doesn’t need to involve a hero since we’re all heroes when we need to be, and therefore nobody is. We just do what we do, and there’s the story.
A thermette is boiling up water just outside the door. Someone always asks “What’s that?” but even if they didn’t ask we’d tell them anyway (stressing it’s the only time in the year that a lucifer is allowed anywhere near The Long Hall). Plates of Anzac biscuits are evidence of the many recipes that still circulate. A wave, a hug maybe, a sprig of rosemary and you’re on your way.
In 2017 Bill Manhire wrote —
It’s often said that poetry is born, as Wordsworth wrote, from the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But sometimes a commission comes along and pushes you beyond your comfort zone. If all goes well, you learn things and surprise yourself. That was my hope when the Fierce Light project got in touch. I was one of half a dozen poets from combatant nations invited to write about the Battle of the Somme. Our poems might even be made into short films.
Initially, I was sceptical. Wasn’t all the World War I centenary stuff a bit dodgy — a celebration of sacrifice rather than a felt commemoration? I’d even written a short poem that hinted at my reservations, entitled My World War I Poem:
Inside each trench, the sound of prayer
Inside each prayer, the sound of digging.
I was also pretty ignorant. My knowledge of WWI mostly came from Wilfred Owen and Blackadder. The commissioning brief encouraged poets to venture beyond the Somme. “Are there contemporary forces, barely comprehensible but becoming clearer, that might benefit from the fierce light of art?” In the end, perhaps the biggest challenge would be to connect the world as it was to the world as it is.
That from an article published in 2017 in The Listener — from, gulp, the world as it was.
The world as it is, Autumn 2020 Lockdown, allows no public gatherings on Anzac Day. The world as it will be is a work in progress but we would hope to see you in 2021 at The Long Hall, Point Jerningham, Waiherere, where the water still falls.