Brian Rudman: Rest in peace in Wellington

Throw a good Auckland versus Wellington stoush and normally I'd be up there on the barricades, waving the blue and white. But in his bid to upstage the National War Memorial and claim the unknown warrior for Auckland, I'm afraid Auckland Museum director Rodney Wilson is on his own.

The whole tussle seems a touch unseemly. Certainly the competition over which city gets to house the remains does. But so, too, does the whole concept of digging up a body that may or may not have been a New Zealand soldier, and bringing it here for reburial as a symbol for all 28,000 New Zealand soldiers lying in foreign graves.

My inclination is to take the classic tombstone inscription - rest in peace - literally. After nearly a century in the ground, haven't they earned the right to be left be?

The present campaign began after this year's Anzac Day commemoration when, after lobbying from the Returned Services Association, both the major parties made bids for the veteran vote by announcing plans to bring a body home.

National got in first on April 24 with leader Bill English pledging to establish a Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the National War Memorial in Wellington.

He even revealed fine detail, declaring that the inscription would read: "All these were honoured in their generations and were the glory of their times", a Biblical quote from Ecclesiasticus 44:7. Less than two hour later, Labour's Veterans Affairs Minister Mark Burton fired back with a press release claiming the Government had been planning a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier "since last year", with a proposed unveiling date in the middle of next year.

Prime Minister Helen Clark subsequently proposed that the date be November 11 next year, the 85th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I.

The National War Memorial was a likely site, she said, but others, such as Parliament and the Auckland War Memorial Museum would be considered.

She said the body of one of New Zealand's unknown soldiers killed on Europe's Western Front in World War I would likely be chosen. It would be buried with a full state funeral.

Good marketeer that he is, Dr Wilson rapidly dispatched a sales pitch to the Prime Minister pointing out that his museum "is an active, participatory memorial to New Zealand's war casualties, with services and programmes which are national in scope and which are located amidst our greatest concentration of population".

He said to choose the Auckland Museum site would "locate the tomb at a place which already has a rich variety of activities and services that validate its memorial role on a daily basis".

On May 29, Judith Tizard, Associate Minister for Arts and Culture, replied. I haven't seen this letter but it must have been in the negative because on July 11 Dr Wilson responded with a letter adding "some further dimensions to our proposal".

His pleading is ingenious, but to make a half-convincing case he has had to move beyond his "further dimension" into a whole new reality.

He writes: "The Auckland cenotaph is, by definition, an 'empty tomb' - a sepulchral monument in honour of people buried elsewhere.

"More than that, it is a direct replica of the Sir Edward Lutyens' Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Whitehall. At one point, when it was built, it was suggested that the body of one unidentified New Zealand serviceman be interred inside the cenotaph just as the Unknown Soldier is buried in Whitehall."

Dr Wilson says that in 1920, when that was mooted, it was thought that to bury unknown warriors all over the empire would undoubtedly detract from having one grave at the heart of the empire symbolically representing all those who had fallen for King and empire.

But with the empire now gone and a New Zealand tomb being considered, Dr Wilson concluded that "it would seem appropriate to consider returning to the early intentions of the 1920s and the Auckland cenotaph as the location for the tomb".

On the face it, the argument has a certain desperate symmetry to it. The only flaw is that the facts are wrong. As he said at the beginning of his argument, a cenotaph is an empty tomb. He should have stuck with that thought because the Whitehall cenotaph on which Auckland's is modelled, is just as empty as the one in front of Dr Wilson's museum.

Truth is, there is no tomb in Whitehall and no unknown soldier buried there. Not at Lutyens' famous cenotaph in Whitehall, anyway. Britain's Tomb of the Unknown Warrior is in Westminster Abbey.

Which blows rather a large hole in Dr Wilson's "further dimensions" argument. Caught up in elections, the Government hasn't responded. Speaking to Ms Tizard, her preference is clearly the Wellington-based National War Memorial.

And short of scattering remains in tombs all around the country, it's hard to disagree that if only one unknown warrior is to come home, then his tomb should be in the capital city, the symbolic heart of the country.