The Shape of Grief pays homage and salutes small towns impacted by war

Billie Taylor with her book The Shape of Grief. Photo / David Haxton

Billie Taylor was stopped in her tracks while travelling home through the King Country.

She wasn't held up with roadworks, holiday traffic, or an accident, but captivated by the war memorial Mapiu Gates.

The gates, framed with red trees and backlit with green emptiness, and the eerie silence of sacrifice, moved her.

Billie would embark on a journey to pay homage and salute small town communities who had lost so many lives in World War I.

"I said to someone that I was going to do a book on memorials, and they said someone else had already done it, which was Jock Phillips."

Undeterred, she visited a large number of memorials throughout the North Island, during the Great War centenary period, carefully taking photographs, and making notes.

Many of those photographs are in her just-released book The Shape of Grief which also highlights lives lost at specific towns, what the population of that area was in 1916, and the population in recent years, and more.

Billie Taylor's new book The Shape of Grief.

"You journey through about 140 war memorial locations but there are about 500 throughout New Zealand."

Her research also raised an eyebrow including an imperial attitude after the war which offered only one national memorial.

"It was quite contentious because there was an urgency from families for a public place to grieve. So basically people funded their own.

"I think it took the government to pass a bylaw, can you believe, to allow local councils, or boroughs in the day, to apply for funding for memorials.

"And the memorials were very expensive.

"The gates at Waitōtara were £250 and bronze and marble statues probably £2000.

"If you consider that in those days the average man's wage was £150 per annum."

Billie, from Te Horo Beach, said war had been a part of her background from an early age.

"I was brought up in the landscape of memorials.

"We got off the bus, at the Cenotaph in Wellington, every day to go to school. It was just part of the fabric of childhood.

"My Poppa, from the Shetland Islands, also served in the Great War [1914-1918]. He was there during that famous soccer game they had on Boxing Day."

Billie's 370 page book was printed on Armistice Day in 2019 and was supposed to be launched on Anzac Day last year but was scuppered because of the Covid-19 lockdown.

It was finally launched at Whakarewarewa, in Rotorua, on Anzac Day this year.

She was happy with the finished product.

"It's a beautiful publication.

"The devastating impact of the Great War shaped our landscape and who we are.

"The Shape of Grief helps to give an historical insight to new generations, as a reminder, lest they forget."

Blue Star, in Petone, printed 500 copies of her book which are available from Books and Co, in Ōtaki, Waiouru Military Museum, Messines military bookshop in Featherston or https://billietaylornz.myshopify.com