Armistice Day Exhibition

May I begin by greeting everyone in the languages of the realm of New Zealand, in English, Maori, Cook Island Maori, Niuean, Tokelauan and New Zealand Sign Language. Greetings, Kia Ora, Kia Orana, Fakalofa Lahi Atu, Taloha Ni and as it is the afternoon (Sign). 

May I specifically greet you, Chief Archivist Dianne Macaskill and Kaumatua Ihaia Biddle of Archives New Zealand (Te Rua Mahara o te Kwanatanga); Your Worship Kerry Prendergast, Mayor of Wellington; Robin Klitscher, President of the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services Association; representatives of the diplomatic corps and the armed forces; distinguished guests otherwise; ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you for the invitation to be here today: it is with great pleasure that my wife Susan and I join you for the opening of this important exhibition, entitled, Impressive Silence: Public Memory and Personal Reality of the Great War. 

Let me congratulate Archives New Zealand and all its partner organisations in the Coming Home Te Hokinga Mai programme of events. 

This programme commemorates the 90 years since, to quote the words of World War I Allied Supreme Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch, "the impressive silence followed upon fifty-three months of battle."  The Armistice was signed, and what was then called the Great War, was over.

This morning I took part in the official Armistice Day service at the National War Memorial.  That moving ceremony was held at a site where the body of an unknown First World War soldier now rests.  He was one of 103,000 New Zealanders who served overseas in World War 1 and one of the 18,500 who died in or because of the war.

There seems to be a strong connection between having been at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior this morning, and being here at Archives New Zealand this afternoon.

Here, that young unknown warrior's terrible experience of war, and the sorrow of those to whom he did not return, is being acknowledged in a sensitive and telling way.  The exhibition, I am advised by Archives staff, considers 'the reality of the grief and loss faced by individuals, families and communities across the country' as a result of World War 1. 

New Zealand historian Neill Atkinson, on the NZ History website, says that at the beginning of that war in 1914, 'most New Zealanders made sense of [its] costs through the idea of the good Christian death.

'This form of consolation and ritual could not prepare people, though, for the scale and manner of death experienced during the war, particularly in France and Belgium. The great distances separating New Zealand soldiers from their families and communities back home and the absence of bodies or funerals added to the difficulties of dealing with grief.'

For those of us living in New Zealand in the early years of the 21^st century, 'the scale and manner of death' in the First World War, and the extent of its impact on our society of 90 years ago, are almost impossible to bring to mind. 

Clearly, though, we owe a debt to those who took part in that war, or who waited for them at home.  This can be accomplished through our attempt at some degree of imaginative engagement with them - in honour of their humanity, and in support of our own.   

Oral historian Alison Parr has talked to many people about their experience of war as part of a project she is undertaking at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.  The late Mrs Thora Simpson, whose relatives are with us today, told Alison Parr about an Aunt of hers named Margaret, who in the 1930s lived in Oamaru, where oak trees were planted along the streets in memory of the war dead.  Mrs Simpson reportedly said to Alison Parr:

'On the day before Anzac Day Aunt Margaret used to go round the garden and the neighbours' and pick stems of laurel and chrysanthemums and she would make five wreaths, proper wreath shape.  On Anzac Day she and I would carry them down to put on the plaques at the base of the trees of boys whom they had known, who had been killed in the First World War. Aunt Margaret was very quiet. She didn't cry or anything she was just very quiet. She didn't get upset. She just would not have much to talk about on the way there.'

In the context of the terrible losses suffered by New Zealanders, this, of course, was Mrs Simpson's Aunt Margaret's own "impressive silence".  Her stoic distress was shared by many of her fellow citizens. 

I suppose that one of the things that is especially significant about Armistice Day this year is that the ninety years represents the longest reasonable expectation of the human lifespan. 

People who were born in 1918, and are living still, are all very old men and women now.  But when they were babies, born at the end of the greatest conflict the world had ever known, they must have represented for their families and their communities the promise of life going on - peacefully, happily - after the four and a half years of bitter and bloody war.

Our acknowledgement of Armistice Day is made especially poignant by our awareness today of what came afterwards.  In little over 20 years, the world was once again at war. 

Our own times are not altogether peaceful ones, but our country seeks to preserve peace; and as New Zealanders we give the maintenance of peace its full due.  Exhibitions like this one surely help us maintain our country's commitment to peace in the world, through reminding us of the true costs of the alternative.   

Let us keep that knowledge clearly in mind - on this date that resonates, the eleventh of the eleventh - and on every day of the year.

It is accordingly with great pleasure as Governor-General that I formally open the Archives New Zealand Armistice Day exhibition, An Impressive Silence.

And on that note, I will close in New Zealand's first language Maori, by offering everyone greetings and wishing you all good health and fortitude in your endeavours. No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, kia ora, kia kaha, tena koutou katoa.