PETER WILLIAMS: Anzac Day Address 2026

NOTE: I was asked to be the guest speaker at the Cromwell Anzac Day service. This address is similar to one I gave at the small Southland community of Waikaka in 2023

Thank you for the invitation to be here this morning.

As a recently arrived Central Otago resident – albeit with a long personal and family history in Otago and Southland – it’s a privilege to deliver the first ANZAC Day address outside this brand new and soon to be officially named Cromwell Memorial Events Centre.

The cenotaph that dominates this new Memorial Garden is hopefully here for the long term, but it has a history of being moved around this town. It was first unveiled on Anzac Day 1923 at the Soldier’s Memorial Gardens down by the now submerged bridge over the Clutha into Cromwell’s then main street of Melmore Terrace.

Around 1987 and with the formation of Lake Dunstan imminent, the monument was moved up the street to be placed, appropriately, outside the War Memorial Hall which used to be on this site and where it stood proudly for nearly 40 years till 2024 when it had to be shifted pending the demolition of the Memorial Hall.

So it’s been on the other side of the car park for the last couple of years while this new facility has been constructed, and now it’s back for what we hope and expect to be a long residence in this Memorial Garden outside a building which the Central Otago Council will surely confirm as being called the Cromwell Memorial Events Centre.

War memorials are a common sight around this country of ours – and so they should be. While there is no definitive number for the number of them around our province it’s estimated there are around 180 monuments or cenotaphs and about the same number of other memorial plaques and honours boards in Otago.

They recognize the reality that thousands of New Zealanders, our forefathers, were sacrificed in wars and other military missions over the last century and a quarter.

I spent a few years as an impressionable young boy in the village of Kennington, just outside Invercargill. The defining feature of that village is still the War Memorial Gate outside where the school used to be.

My father was the teacher there more than 65 years ago and although the school is long gone, the gate is still there – standing proud and no doubt hosting some kind of Anzac Day commemoration today.

I’ve been back through the village a few times over the years and especially when I’m travelling by myself I like to stop at that gate and remember not just the days of a happy childhood in the Southland countryside of the early 1960s, but I also think of the young men from the area who went off to war and whose names are engraved in the panels set in the concrete surrounds of that gate.

And I ask myself, why did they go? Did they really want to? Did they know what they were fighting for?

As a child and young teenager, I knew a World War 1 veteran. He was married to my grandmother for the last ten years of his life. I knew him as Uncle Fred from when I was about 5.

His name was Fred Boocock. He came from Annat, a dot on the map on the Canterbury Plains. He was born in 1893 and after Army training in Canterbury left New Zealand on April 17, 1915 on one of the three HMNZTs, Her Majesty’s New Zealand Troopships, that sailed from Wellington that day.

By not leaving till the middle of April, he wasn’t at Gallipoli for the landings on the morning of the 25^th, but he did serve on the peninsula from August that year till the end of that disastrous campaign early in 1916.

He never held high rank. On the army roll he’s listed in the “rank” column among privates and troopers and riflemen as a driver in the Army Service Corp. His brother James was a corporal in the Canterbury Mounted Rifles.

From what I can glean from family members in recent years, Uncle Fred then moved with his colleagues from Gallipoli west across the Mediterranean to the western front, and the awful battles on the fields of northern France and Belgium.

I don’t know exactly where he served. I wish now I’d asked him more about those times when he was alive. But I was 15 when he died and I never found it appropriate or comfortable to pry into someone’s war history, especially when he had been seriously injured.

Because what I do know is that sometime, and I think it was in 1917, he suffered an horrendous injury and had his right forearm damaged so badly it required amputation.

He was taken to an army hospital in England where he recuperated for over a year before returning to New Zealand in 1919.

He had a crude prosthetic brace attached to his arm just below his right elbow and from that brace you could click in other attachments, the weirdest one of all being a wooden hand enclosed in a brown glove which had a screw to which you attached a knife at meal time.

I do remember him showing us a metal cigarette box, which he kept as a memento and which had a significant dent in it. It saved his life because he said it was in his breast pocket and acted as body armour when a bullet hit him.

When he came back from the war, he married and in the 1920s owned a neighborhood shop in Christchurch, but for whatever reason that business didn’t work out. He either could not or would not work again, so for about 40 years, his son told me later, his only source of income was the war pension.

According to the records his injury and disability meant he was awarded 30 shillings a week in 1920, an amount that was surely increased over time as he married and had 2 sons of his own before being widowed after World War 2 and subsequently marrying my divorced grandmother 10 years later.

But as I’ve grown to adulthood and been very fortunate to work in an industry that I mostly enjoyed for pretty close to 50 years, I sometimes think how you would feel about your purpose in life if you were unable to work because of injury and disability suffered in a war that was not your country’s war.

So why were the young New Zealand men of 1914 so enthusiastic about going to battle?

And at the risk of reading the minds of young men from more than a century ago, I suspect there were two reasons – one, it was huge adventure. A trip to the other side world in those days was something only the really wealthy could afford.

And two, there existed in many young men of the time a sense of duty to King and Country. James Hargest, that famous son of Southland who served in both world wars, said that despite his lack of education, that while working on his father’s farm in the Hokonuis, he dreamed of serving the mighty British empire. No doubt the seeds of that thinking had been sown during his limited primary school education.

Which goes to show that indoctrination of our children is not a new thing.

Did these young men really want to go? Early on in World War 1 the answer would surely have been yes. The original ANZACs of 1915 were all volunteers. Hargest was a volunteer. So was my Uncle Fred.

But the number of casualties in Gallipoli and on the Western Front and the subsequent drop off in voluntary enrollments, meant that conscription was introduced in 1916.

It sounds like a time in New Zealand history which might not have been very pleasant.

As reports came back about the horrific slaughter of New Zealand youth at Gallipoli, and then on the fields of Belgium and Northern France, thousands of military age men decided they did not want to go to war.

But the government, under Prime Minister William Massey was hard-nosed. Those who objected to going to war were hunted down.

Eventually 286 men were sent to jail as conscientious objectors. One of them was a future Prime Minister - Peter Fraser.

Another 2320 men were labelled military defaulters and were deprived of civil rights for ten years. That meant they couldn’t have a job in the public service or with a local council, they couldn’t vote in general or local elections and couldn’t be an MP or a councillor.

Over a hundred years later the names of those 2320 men are still published on-line. What must their descendants think?

Even from the distance of more than a hundred years, I find the denial of those basic human rights like having a job of your choice and being able to vote quite repugnant, especially when the so called “crime” was refusing to fight another nation’s war.

But in the end the volunteers completely outnumbered the conscripted by a ratio of 4 to 1.

The official number of New Zealand servicemen who went overseas in World War 1 was 98,950. That was 9 percent of the then New Zealand population.

But that leads to the next question I pose. What were these men actually fighting for?

The actual causes of World War I are still debated by historians even now, but the overall theme is one of nationalism and military expansion throughout Europe because of the competing interests of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

Britain was worried about the potential for Germany to become all powerful in Europe, so resisted the expansion and went to war on mainland Europe, but even so, why did New Zealand have to become involved from the other side of the world?

The answer lies in the ties of the apron strings to Mother England.

25 years later Michael Joseph Savage, the first Labour Party Prime Minister said of Britain when Hitler invaded Poland starting World War 2, “where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand.”

In 1914 and 1915, the same obligation existed. It wasn’t just a cultural one in this nation - by that time dominated by British and Irish immigrants. It was an economic one too.

They bought our produce, our meat, our wool, our butter. They paid New Zealand’s way in the world. Our political leaders were unquestioning in their military support, and the majority of the population agreed.

But the price we paid as a nation was appalling.

18,058 New Zealanders died in World War I, nearly 2 percent of the entire New Zealand population.

No wonder HG Wells called it “the war to end war.”

Yet barely twenty years later we were at it again, and once again a generation of young New Zealand men went off to stop the military expansionism not just of Germany and Italy, but this time too of Japan, and the real threat that was therefore posed to these remote islands in the South Pacific.

This time percentage of New Zealanders involved overseas during the 6 years of war was similar to World War I – 140,000 from a population of 1.6 million.

For what it’s worth, there were fewer casualties. 11,928 is the official number of New Zealand deaths in the war, but per million of population it was still the highest ratio in the Commonwealth.

As with the 1914-18 conflict, the public support for the war effort was considerable. This was despite conscription again – instigated by that old “conchy,” the conscientious objector himself, Peter Fraser.

Just to prove that left wing Prime Ministers have always been hypocrites, Fraser’s coalition government oversaw the imprisonment of more than 800 conchies in the Second World War for the so called “crime” of not wanting to risk their lives in war.

As well there was strict censorship.

In 1942, a Methodist minister Ormond Burton, who was actually a decorated World War 1 veteran, was jailed for 2 and half years for publishing a so-called subversive document, a Christian Pacificist Society bulletin.

The story of his trial makes for somber reading in the days before we had a Bill of Rights Act.

The Judge, Justice Archibald Blair told the jury it was time the mouths of cranks should be shut.

The sentence for such an act, publishing so-called subversive material, was 12 months.

But the judge invoked a section of the Crimes Act and put him away for 2 and half years.

Ormond Burton was a man ahead of his time. He maintained his Pacifist beliefs and later marched against the Vietnam War. He died in 1974.

So twice in thirty years we sent a generation of young men off to war to die on the battlefields of Europe and Asia.

We have had it instilled into us that these men were heroes. “They died so that we may live” has been a constant catch cry on ANZAC Day most of my life.

But if they died to protect freedom, then what does that say about modern day New Zealand, a New Zealand that many of a self-appointed elite don’t even want to call by its legally constituted name. Even worse they want to take away the freedoms that distinguish a mature liberal democracy.

I don’t know how much the unjustified punishment dished out to the conchies of the world wars contributed to the drafting of the Bill of Rights Act in 1990.

In my mind that Act should be the foundation of life in New Zealand today – the freedom of thought, conscience and opinion, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, the right to vote with equal suffrage where every vote is of equal value - and the right to refuse to undergo medical treatment.

What I’ve seen in the last five years is an erosion of those rights, an erosion of those freedoms, and as we approach this year’s election, we should remember just what our options are.

If those 28,000 New Zealanders who died in the world wars were indeed dying for our freedom, dying so that our democracy could be protected, then let us ensure that more than 80 years after the end of the second of those global conflicts that democracy is indeed protected.

Let us ensure that James Hargest and his son Geoffrey did not die so that the value of a vote could be increased for some but not for others. Let us ensure that Fred Boocock did not have his arm blown off on the western front so that we lost our ability to express opinions freely and without disadvantage.

Let us ensure we continue to gather at places like this wonderful new community asset every April 25^th and remember what those wars were about.

Let’s protect democracy, and let’s protect freedom.

Lest we forget.

Thank you.

Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on Reality Check Radio three days a week and writing at Peter's substack