States of mind: remembering the Australian-New Zealand relationship.

{1} On 24 April 2001, the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand participated in the dedication of the New Zealand Memorial on ANZAC Parade in Canberra. Others participating in the ceremony included a Napier school boy, who read from the 1919 publication, The New Zealanders at Gallipoli; the female chaplain of the Royal New Zealand Navy, who offered the prayers as well as performed the consecration and dedication of the memorial; and the National President of the New Zealand RSA, who read the Ode. A Haka Taua (Warrior Haka) was performed by New Zealand Defence Force personnel and was responded to by members of the Maori community in Canberra. The march past of veterans was greeted at the eastern side of the memorial by a Karanga performed by Maori servicewomen, and at the western side by the sounds of the didgeridoo, tap sticks and spirit callers played by the Aboriginal people of the Canberra region.

{2} The New Zealand Memorial stands at the intersection of ANZAC Parade and Constitution Avenue. It is the site on ANZAC parade closest to the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, and the view across to Parliament House is uninterrupted. The design is that of a kete, a flax basket, inspired by the Maori proverb "Mau tena kiwai o te kete, maku tenei" (each of us at the handle of the basket). The proverb is engraved in both Maori and English on both sides of the memorial (it should be noted that the design originally incorporated an Aboriginal translation.) Two bronze kete handles stand over eleven metres tall. The paved areas underneath the handles are "meeting places" and were designed by indigenous artists from each country, the patterns in the paving representing the woven flax of the kete. Both paved areas incorporate the names of battlegrounds where New Zealand and Australian soldiers fought together, beginning with South Africa and ending with Vietnam. Both paved areas have in the centre a stone covering buried boxes of earth; on the eastern (New Zealand) side, the earth is from Chunuk Bair, and on the western (Australian) side it is from Lone Pine.

What are we remembering?

{3} To memorialise the relationship between New Zealand and Australia required decisions on the questions of what to commemorate, what memories were to be preserved in stone and bronze, and what was worthy of remembering. In both the specifications for the design and in its dedication, it is the relationship of 1915 and beyond that has been privileged in this remembrance. One might suggest that it is the clean, consensual collective memory that is being assisted by this memorial, the seemingly unproblematic ANZAC relationship.

{4} The memorial gives rise to a range of possible readings. One reading is that the memorial brings to ANZAC Parade a set of symbols not used in the other memorials. The indigenous imagery is one of those sets of symbols; and along with the Nurses' Memorial, the use of the kete softens the often harsh, hard-edged symbols of war. It is a domesticated symbol, possibly even, in the broadest terms, a feminine one. The New Zealand Memorial has more in common with the contoured form of the Nurses' Memorial, which represents "the nurturing hands of the nurse", than with the other memorial dedicated to New Zealand and Australian troops, the Desert Corps Memorial, which has a drama and force very different to the curving, supple arches. It has also been suggested that in commemorating the wider trans-Tasman relationship, the New Zealand Memorial forms a gateway from the civic, represented by Parliament House, to the military, represented by ANZAC Parade and the Australian War Memorial. (1) This representation of the wider relationship is not overly apparent to the visitor, and is much clearer if one has some knowledge of the intention and process of the building of the memorial.

The inside story

{5} Within the development of the specifications for the New Zealand Memorial, there was tension about the theme of war as the bond between the nations. In the commissioning process there were deliberate attempts made to keep the Memorial as a commemoration of the wider relationship between Australia and New Zealand. The call for expressions of interest stated that the overall theme of the Memorial should include "a clear New Zealand identity ... but also acknowledging the nature of the ANZAC relationship; and expression of the trans-Tasman bond (that is, taking 'ANZAC' as representing more than just an historic military relationship)". (2) In the document laying out the conditions for the project it was added: "It is not intended that this will be a war memorial. Although New Zealand and Australia's shared military history should be reflected in some way, a memorial which expresses only this dimension of the relationship would be unacceptable." (3) It is acknowledged in the documents however, that ANZAC Parade acts as an "Honour Roll, the place which records, progressively, the service and sacrifice of those Australians who have served this country [presumably Australia] in numerous conflicts, many giving their lives for peace and liberty". (4) And the first book recommended to designers in the document is Chris Maclean's and Jock Phillips' The sorrow and the pride: New Zealand war memorials. (5)

{6} Very few visitors will come to the memorial with this knowledge. To see the memorial in its position and context, to read the interpretive plaque, to see the symbols and to recognise those that hold currency, the memorial presents a very different story.

Encountering the Memorial

{7} The New Zealand Memorial is to the visitor, despite its seemingly neutral nomenclature, arguably a war memorial. This is possibly the inescapable result of the memorial's siting, in that if it were not a war memorial it would be the only non-war memorial on ANZAC Parade. But it is the burial of soil from the sacred sites of Chunuk Bair and Lone Pine in the centre of the memorial, as well as the inscriptions of battlegrounds under the feet of visitors that locates this very firmly in the genre of war memorials. Both of these features were added after the design tendered by Kingsley Baird and the Studio of Pacific Architecture had won the competition. The winning design was altered, not largely, but significantly, creating a very different memorial from the one initially selected. The original plans incorporated the relationship forged in war in a series of "scars", deep gashes in the metal of the arches. This was a little too subtle, however, for the RSA, and the names of the battlegrounds and the soil from the Gallipoli Peninsula were incorporated into the design.

{8} The interpretive plaque near the memorial gives the visitor an indication of the purpose of the memorial using set phrases very familiar to Australians and New Zealanders:

   The New Zealand Memorial commemorates the unique
   friendship between New Zealand and Australian people.
   The two kete, or basket, handles express the shared effort
   needed to achieve common goals in both peace and war,
   and to acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of the
   servicemen and women of both countries who fought
   shoulder to shoulder on foreign soil.

It does, very briefly, describe the parts of the memorial that represent a wider relationship: the patterns of flax weaving represent the "interweaving of lands, people and cultures". And then the interpretation returns to the safety of familiar terrain, Gallipoli, and the "birthplace of the ANZAC tradition".

{9} The New Zealand Memorial was also dedicated as a war memorial with both Prime Ministers recognising that the basis for the "close relationship" was war. (6) Helen Clark paid "tribute to the ANZAC relationship"; John Howard stated: "First and foremost, but not only, this is a memorial to those men and women of Australia and New Zealand who in various conflicts have given their lives." (7) Pauline Law, the Navy chaplain who dedicated the memorial did so this way:

   May this memorial be a reminder to all of the sacrifice
   made by New Zealanders and Australians, who laid down
   their lives in service to their countries, and in the cause of
   justice, peace and freedom. May it serve as a symbol of
   our duty to our countries, our leaders and those whom we
   serve. May this memorial inspire in all, service above
   self, and a commitment to those same ideas of justice,
   peace and freedom. (8)

{10} Some other symbols in the memorial do speak to the wider relationship between New Zealand and Australia; Jenny Bornholdt's poem reflects some of these aspects of our shared past:

   This sea we cross over
   And over. Tides turning on
   Gold and sheep. On rain. On sand.
   On earth the fallen lie
   Beneath. On geography. On
   women standing, Matilda
   waltzing. On people of
   gardens and movement.
   On trade and union.
   This sea a bridge
   Of faith. This sea we are
   Contained and
   Moved by.

{11} Here were pre-1915 references, but how was it possible to maintain the unity of the national narratives through these examples. How was the trans-Tasman migration of the gold rushes to be explained without reference to the treatment of Chinese? How could white womanhood suffrage in the two countries be compared without the recognition that, in Australia, suffrage was a story of white liberal progressivism, with the deliberate exclusion of Aboriginal men and women from the franchise. (9) And the reference to "trade and union"? Again, how could the patchy history of labour leaders who became prime ministers, and the "Red Fed" scourge of Australian labour organisers in New Zealand industrial relations be discussed and memorialised? (10) Pre-1915 is obviously just too hard.

{12} However, the classic symbols of the ANZAC relationship, and the invocation of the "ideals" and "values" of the ANZACs lose much of their shine when combined with the use of indigenous design. As much as the Prime Ministers, indeed not any two PMs but John Howard and Helen Clark, repeated the national and trans-Tasman myths of ANZACs, mates, and working together, the incorporation of indigenousness into the memorial allows for the possibility of disrupting those myths.

War memorials, remembering and forgetting

{13} Much has been written about the meanings of war memorials. There is little dispute among scholars that memorials served as a site of mourning both for individuals and for larger groups--communities and sometimes nations. Interpretations from more critical perspectives have defined war memorials as places where the nation worships itself or, less charitably, where a democratic facade thinly veils an acknowledgment that "the state is entitled to kill its citizens". (11) These are not meanings which can be necessarily imposed on the New Zealand Memorial, but they raise the question of the range of meanings that can be attributed to late twentieth-century memorials as opposed to those constructed in the inter-war period. This memorial does, however, have meanings in common with other war memorials. It is an attempt at consensus and unanimity, as most memorials are. The memorial has become part of what Yves Helias has called "an exercise in 'biopolitics'". (12) They are sites of symbolic exchange; they form part of an organic, changing political landscape. (13) Helias argues that it is through the construction of war memorials that death is both deconstructed, with horror and trauma being buried, and reinvested with meaning. (14) In this case we could argue that it is not the meaning of war that is being transformed but national narratives born in 1915 that are being deconstructed, and reinvested with meaning. On the other hand, the New Zealand Memorial is also part of the role war memorials play as "a means of forgetting". (15) While Jay Winter has argued that the construction of, and ceremonies surrounding, war memorials were used by mourning families to pass through grief, to separate from the dead and begin to live again, a more antipodean meaning can be brought to his notion of "the necessary art of forgetting". (16) What is possibly being achieved through the New Zealand Memorial and its use of symbols is consensus at the expense of history. It could be read as an ironic parallel to what W. E. H. Stanner called in 1968 "the great Australian silence" and, more recently, what Robert Manne has called "historical denialism". (17)

{14} In the press releases and dignitaries' speeches about the New Zealand Memorial it is the ANZAC relationship that is lauded as the foundation of the friendship between New Zealand and Australia. John Howard invoked the words of the soldier-poet Leon Gellert from the poem "ANZAC Cove" in his speech, "'There's a sound of gentle sobbing in the South'", continuing, "He [the poet] was undoubtedly speaking of the sense of shared grief held by so many people in our two nations during that terrible costly campaign".

{15} Helen Clark similarly marked the beginning of the relationship as being a military one:

   Under the ANZAC banner of the Australian and New
   Zealand Army Corps, we served together in Gallipoli. We
   fought alongside each other in the mud on the Western
   Front, and in Vietnam.

Ms Clark did however recognise that the military link between Australia and New Zealand was formed before the First World War, when both colonial Australian and New Zealand troops served in South Africa. This "shared military history" was not extended back to the New Zealand Wars however. During the campaigns of the 1860s against the Maoris, "New Zealand obtained weapons and supplies from Australia including gunboats ... for operations on the Waikato River". (18) The Victorian government sent the warship HMCS Victoria to New Zealand, where several New Zealanders joined her crew, forming what military historians have called "the first unofficial ANZAC unit". (19) In addition, approximately 2,500 Australians served with the Waikato and Taranaki militias in 1863-64. (20) "New Zealand", however, does not appear as a battleground on the New Zealand Memorial. Interestingly, and again as part of the inside story, the Australian participation in the New Zealand Wars is ignored in the Order of Service for the Dedication ceremony. (21)

{16} It must also be remembered that since the opening of the Vietnam Memorial, the only war now not commemorated on ANZAC Parade (or indeed anywhere in Australia with official sanction) is that between European settlers and Australia's indigenous people. It is almost universally accepted among military historians, and indeed by the recent Governor-General, Sir William Deane, that this long conflict did indeed constitute warfare, yet official recognition of the frontier wars is yet to come. (22) The use of indigenous symbols to represent the nations on ANZAC Parade seems at best ironic, given the silence about, and invisibility of, wars on our own soils against our own people.

{17} These ironies are further magnified when combined with the rhetoric of the "ideals" and the "values" of this mystical cult of the ANZACs.

ANZAC values

{18} In his speeches, both at the dedication of the New Zealand Memorial and at ANZAC Day the following day, John Howard spoke of "values". At the dedication ceremony he commented that the association between Australia and New Zealand was "built on common values" ("built on history and common contemporary interests but also shared recreation and shared contemporary values"); and he predicted that "we'll forever share this part of the world and we'll forever share a common set of values that mean so much to all of us." (23) He was a bit clearer in the meaning of "values" for Australians at least in his ANZAC Day address: "We gather together to be reminded of the values so evident among Australians in time of war and adversity.... Courage, unity of purpose, compassion and selflessness". (24) In the Order of Service for the Dedication, Jock Phillips wrote:

   On the steep slopes of Gallipoli and then in the muddy
   fields of the Western Front, New Zealanders and
   Australians came to hold each other in the highest respect
   and to recognise shared values--toughness, bravery,
   initiative, loyalty to mates. (25)

There are other values that the ANZACs were imbued with that have been rendered invisible, not only in the rhetoric, but in most memorials, particularly this one. They were values inculcated by a belief in the superiority of "Whiteness", and equality for some at the expense of "others".

{19} Most soldiers serving in the NZEF and the AIF were born between the mid-1880s and the mid-1890s; they were children and young adolescents when Australia became a federated nation. (26) Did they stand waving flags at the parades and ceremonies that marked the occasion? Their parents were Victorians rather than Edwardians; and their parents were active political agents in the 1890s through to the outbreak of war. It can be suggested that the soldiers of the NZEF and AIF grew up in what was politically and legislatively the most racist and racially repressive period in the histories of Australia and New Zealand, and it was this culture and this value system with which the ANZACs were imbued.

{20} The politics of exclusion was rife in the Australasian colonies of the 1890s. The now well-known phrase excluding from civil rights and benefits, "Asiatics, or aboriginal natives of Australia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific, excepting New Zealand", appeared constantly in the Australian Commonwealth legislation. Australian Acts such as the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, the Invalid and Old Age Pension Act 1908, and the various Sugar Bounty Acts (1905, 1907) were designed to restrict and disadvantage the non-white population of Australia, both the insiders and the outsiders. (27) The New Zealand equivalents of these provisions tended to target the Chinese. The Immigration Restriction Act 1899 also contained the infamous dictation test and was amended in 1920 to prescribe what some historians have called the "undeclared White New Zealand policy". (28) Manying Ip has argued that in these early years of the twentieth century, the shared idea of a New Zealand "people" coalesced into a notion that defined those who were non-Christian and non-European in culture as "unassimilable". (29)

{21} The control of "insiders" equally became more rigid and punitive in the 1890s. The 1897 Queensland Act, the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act was the first of the Australian Acts to "regulate comprehensively" the lives of Aboriginal people. (30) This was followed in other States by laws varying in content but similar in spirit: the Western Australian Aborigines Act 1905; the infamous dispersal acts in NSW in 1909; the South Australian Aborigines Act 1911. (31) Control of Maori life was not so rigorously legislated, although it could be argued that the 1890s were when Maori landlessness became acute. Some parallels to the Australian legislation could be seen in the enforcement in the early twentieth century of the suppression of Maori language in schools, and the introduction of the Native Health Act 1909. (32) Some argue that the Tohunga Suppression Act 1908 was an attempt to suppress Maori traditions, although how far-reaching the implications of this Act were is debatable. At the turn of the century there were debates about, and criticism of, the control of Maori councils over land sales, with the New Zealand Herald denouncing "rule by coloured or native races over British leaseholders". (33) In 1905 the passage of the Maori Land Settlement Act replaced Maori councils with land boards presided over by Pakeha majorities. (34)

{22} The constitution of the NZEF and the AIF in 1914, and the legends that were created from the ANZAC campaign are integrally linked to this legislative period through the Australian Defence Act 1909. The 1909 Act was an amendment to the Defence Act 1903 and both introduced compulsory military training and made provision for the establishment of the Royal Military College, Duntroon (where ten of the 41 in the first intake were New Zealanders). (35) The 1909 amendment made military training compulsory for all boys from the age of 12 years. Part XIII of the Act made provision for the peacetime exemption of those who were reported as medically "unfit", "those who are not substantially of European origin or descent", or school teachers who had qualified at military schools. (36)

{23} The parliamentary debate about this amendment made no reference to the exclusion of non-European Australians. The debates were concerned with the age at which boys should begin training, the need for an egalitarian army, and taxpayer support for such a scheme. In the second reading of the Bill, the Defence Minister, Joseph Cook, spoke quite clearly for both parties when he argued:

   We have set up a White Australia ideal. ... But we are
   depending for its maintenance upon a country which is
   not able to close its doors to the coloured labour of the
   world as we do ... I question very much whether we have
   a right to continue to depend absolutely upon that
   protection alone while we pursue the ideals that we are
   able to do here--ideals of a very different character from
   theirs. (37)

In neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives was the exemption clause an issue for debate.

{24} The New Zealand Defence Act 1909 made no such exemption from military training on the basis of race. The exemption of indigenous people from conscription was, however, a common element of the two countries' defence policies. (38) In Australia, this was less important, as conscription was never enacted. In New Zealand, however, the perceived failure of Maoris to reinforce the Maori Contingent after having waged a considerable battle to get the Maori Contingent on overseas service in the first place, saw Maui Pomare urge the extension of the 1916 Military Services Act to Maoris. That the recruitment campaigns failed to reinforce the Maori Contingent speaks to the possibility of wide-spread dissent among Maori. Ostensibly the extension of conscription applied to all Maoris; in practice however, it was enforced only on Waikato. Having suffered enormously under the land confiscations of the 1860s, Waikato had refused to offer men for the Maori Contingent. Te Puea had put it succinctly:

   They tell us to fight for king and country.... We've got a
   King. But we haven't got a country. ... Let them give us
   back our land and then maybe we'll think about it again. (39)

{25} In total, approximately 2,500-3,000 Maoris enlisted for service in the Great War, out of a total of 102,000 enlistments who saw overseas service in the NZEF; approximately 300-400 Aboriginal Australians enlisted in the 330,000 strong AIF serving overseas. Symbolically, Maori service has come to mean much more. The Maori Contingent, to be known as Te Hokowhitu a Tu from 1917, became an integral part of the New Zealand national remembrance of the Great War, particularly when it was compounded by the Maori Battalion's participation in the Second World War. In their History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, Donald Denoon, Philippa Mein-Smith and Marivic Wyndam write: "The Pioneer Battalion marched into their national story by shedding blood--while Aboriginal Australians, collectively, though not individually, were shut out once again." (40)

{26} There are many tensions in the process of remembrance. The Australian War Memorial has defended its decision not to highlight in some way the names of Aboriginal servicemen whose names appear on the Second World War Roll of Honour, arguing that it is in the egalitarian tradition that they honour those men along with their white comrades. It is the position of non-discrimination. Against that is the argument that by not alerting the visiting public to those men's service in the face of legislative and social barriers, we perpetuate precisely that myth of the egalitarian army and of the ANZAC values of freedom and justice. By assimilating indigenousness into the civic and military narrative of Australia and New Zealand, the divisions and contests between indigenous cultures and their colonisers are silenced; yet, to remove them is perhaps to perpetuate their representation as the eternal victims. There are tensions, too, in the constant reference to 1915 as the birth of the relationship between New Zealand and Australia. It leaves our national narratives rooted in the safety of white men's deeds on foreign soil, the comfort of historical denialism, and the poverty of unanimity.

{27} The concern must be that the victory of conservative national narratives will mean most New Zealanders and Australians who visit the memorial will see it as a tribute to the ANZAC relationship. Hopefully, though, the representation of the nations through indigenous symbolism will stir enough disquiet to unsettle that narrative, producing tension between inclusivity and identity that will impact, even slightly, on our states of mind.

Notes

(1.) Conversation with Brodie Stubbs, New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (Ministry of Culture and Heritage), August 2001.

(2.) "Proposal for a New Zealand Memorial, ANZAC Parade, Canberra: an invitation to participate in a two-stage design project", DIA (MCH), p.7.

(3.) "Proposal for a New Zealand Memorial, ANZAC Parade, Canberra: conditions for a two-stage project", DIA (MCH), p.4.

(4.) "Proposal for a New Zealand Memorial, ANZAC Parade, Canberra: conditions for a two-stage project", DIA (MCH), pp.4-5.

(5.) "Proposal for a New Zealand Memorial, ANZAC Parade, Canberra: conditions for a two-stage project", DIA (MCH), p.11. This list of references is not alphabetical. Chris Maclean & Jock Phillips, The sorrow and the pride: New Zealand war memorials (Wellington: Historical Branch/GP Books, 1990).

(6.) "NZ Memorial in Canberra dedicated", Helen Clarke speeches and releases, http://www.liveupdater.com/labour/LiveArticles.asp?ArtID=2065383978

(7.) Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon. John Howard MP address at New Zealand Memorial dedication service, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, http://www.pm.gov.au.

(8.) New Zealand Memorial dedication: order of service, 24 April 2001.

(9.) Patricia Grimshaw, Colonialism, gender and representations of race: issues in writing women's history in Australia and the Pacific, Melbourne University history occasional papers, Melbourne, 1994; see also Marilyn Lake, "Between old world 'barbarism' and stone-age 'primitivism': the double difference of the white Australian feminist", in Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (eds), Australian women: contemporary feminist thought (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).

(10.) Rollo Arnold, "The Australasian peoples and their world, 1888-1915" in Keith Sinclair, (ed), Tasman relations: New Zealand and Australia, 1788-1988 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987), p.68.

(11.) Ken Inglis, Sacred places: war memorials in the Australian landscape (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1998), p.471. See George Mosse, Fallen soldiers: reshaping the memory of the world wars, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

(12.) Yves Helias, Les monuments aux morts, 1977, as quoted in Jay Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning: the Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1995) 1996), p.94.

(13.) Winter, p.94.

(14.) In Helias' argument, this meaning is one of sacrifice as an expression of the general will, and an affirmation of the state's right to call upon its citizens to kill and to die; Winter, p.94.

(15.) Winter, p.115.

(16.) Winter, p.115.

(17.) W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: black and white Australians--an anthropologist's view (Sydney: ABC Books, 1969), p.25; Robert Manne, "In denial: the stolen generations and the Right', The Australian Quarterly Essay, issue 1, 2001, p.93.

(18.) ANZAC: The New Zealand Story, Special Exhibition at the Australian War Memorial, 24 April-29 August 2001.

(19.) ANZAC: The New Zealand Story.

(20.) ANZAC: The New Zealand Story. See also Peter Dennis, et al, The Oxford companion to Australian military history (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.435.

(21.) New Zealand Memorial dedication, p.6.

(22.) See, for example, the chapter by Richard Broome, "The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European warfare, 1770-1930" in Michael McKernan & Margaret Browne (eds), Australia: two centuries of war and peace (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1988).

(23.) Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP address at New Zealand Memorial dedication service, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, http://www.pm.gov.au.

(24.) Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP address at the ANZAC Day parade, Canberra, http://www.pm.gov.au.

(25.) New Zealand Memorial dedication, p.6.

(26.) Lloyd Robson, in his statistical sampling of the AIF, has identified that the bulk of AIF enlistments were aged between 20-29 years. See Lloyd Robson, "The origins of the first AIF, 1914-1918: some statistical evidence", Historical Studies, vol.15, no.61, October 1973, pp.737-749.

(27.) See John Chesterman & Brian Galligan, Citizens without rights: Aborigines and Australian citizenship (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.85ff.

(28.) Donald Denoon, Philippa Mein-Smith & Marivic Wyndham, A history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific (Malden, Mass., US: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p.211.

(29.) Manying Ip, Dragons on the Long White Cloud: the making of Chinese New Zealanders (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1996), pp.174-5.

(30.) Chesterman & Galligan, p.39.

(31.) See Chesterman & Galligan, pp.39-40; on New South Wales, see Peter Read, "'A rape of the soul so profound': some reflections on the dispersal policy in New South Wales", in Valerie Chapman & Peter Read (eds), Terrible hard biscuits: a reader in Aboriginal history (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp.202-214.

(32.) On schooling and Maori language, see Ranganui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: struggle without end (Auckland: Penguin, 1990), pp.146-8.

(33.) Walker, p.176.

(34.) Walker, p.176.

(35.) ANZAC: The New Zealand Story.

(36.) Commonwealth of Australia Acts, 1909, S138-1.

(37.) Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol.51, p.3614.

(38.) See Defence Act 1910, S61 (h) for the exemption in Australia; for New Zealand, see Michael King, Te Puea: a biography (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977), pp.77ff.

(39.) King, Te Puea, p.78.

(40.) Denoon, et al, p.280

Dr Kate Hunter grew up in the Riverina and studied for her PhD at the University of Melbourne. Since 1995 she has been lecturing in History at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She currently teaches Australian history, rural history, and the social and cultural impact of the First World War.