Our public holidays are an odd assortment. Four of them – the ones at Christmas and Easter – are Christian celebrations that were themselves adaptations of pagan festivals. One marks the birthday of an increasingly irrelevant monarch half a world away. Another celebrates the introduction of the 40-hour working week (younger readers, ask your parents). Then there is the set of provincial “anniversary days”, celebrating milestones of colonisation.
Of those with a reasonable claim to being national days that tell us something about the identity of Aotearoa New Zealand, there are three. Anzac Day commemorates – some say celebrates, others say mourns – a disastrous World War I event. Waitangi Day commemorates an agreement between two peoples that was broken almost as soon as it was made. And Matariki, which is only a year old, has its origins in outer space. It’s all very confusing.
One thing they have in common is that, for many of us, they mean a day off work. That itself is a custom with religious origins, based as it is on the biblical day of rest taken by the Almighty as outlined in Genesis 2: 2-3.
Another common characteristic is that they include ritual elements. We do things to “mark the occasion”. One hallmark of a ritual’s efficacy, says Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka, is flexibility.
“That is absolutely vital, for if a ritual loses its efficacy, then it becomes meaningless.” And Anzac Day has demonstrated that repeatedly.
Bönisch-Brednich puts Anzac Day in the context of national days in general: “A national day is about remembering what your nation and your country is about. But it’s also actively constructing what your country is about.” And because countries change, what we construct and include in our national days also has to change.
Shifting meaning
Whether seen as about heroism or sacrifice, Anzac Day has arguably been through more reinventions than any other of these holidays. The question to be asked may not be “what is it for?”, but “what is it for this year?”. Which raises another question: what features does a day need to make it a truly inclusive New Zealand national holiday in 2023?
Unsurprisingly, as the nation gets more comfortable with its bicultural identity, Māori elements have become more prominent in Anzac rituals, while specifically religious elements have become less visible.
April Boland is finishing a master’s degree in religious studies at Victoria University. She says that ceremonies for Anzac Day, which have always included a lot of religious elements, have in recent years “changed to include a lot of te reo” and that the religious element is becoming less visible. Māori up, God down.
“The chaplains who I’ve spoken to put an emphasis on generalising their prayers. They only get a small slot to speak, but they try to be very nonspecific.” In fact, she notes, “it’s no longer a requirement in the NZDF [New Zealand Defence Force] for the chaplains to be Christian. They can be secular, they can be Muslim.”
Bönisch-Brednich believes Anzac Day would be even more inclusive if the Māori concept of hosting, manaakitanga, was more widely appreciated and applied. “It would have much stronger indigenous elements that reach out and invite participation from a wide range of people,” she says.
Anzac Day originally commemorated the April 25, 1915, landing of Anzac forces at Gallipoli in World War I, but for a long time now the commemoration has been expanded to acknowledge all kinds of sacrifice in all the wars in which New Zealand has been involved.
In fact, there is still much to learn about those events. Historian James Belich is Beit professor of imperial and Commonwealth history at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He is currently researching, he says, “World War I, and its terrible impact on New Zealand and New Zealanders. And then trying to explain why they volunteered in the numbers they did. And then come up with a hypothesis that explains that, which was an increasing affinity towards Britain at the time.”
Eighty per cent of those who fought were volunteers. You’d think by now we would have worked out why we were so keen back then, but as Belich says, “the inside of people’s heads is the most difficult of historians’ terrain. It’s relatively easy to find out what elites might have thought and what newspapers wanted people to think.”
He famously described Gallipoli as creating a cult of “18,000 Kiwi Christs” in his history Paradise Reforged. Does he still think that image of martyrdom is appropriate?
“Once you’ve suffered 60,000 casualties, you don’t want to say, ‘Woops!’ That’s equivalent to about 20 million people in the United States today. So there’s a role there, but there’s also a deeper resonance. I’m not sure that we have actually nailed the impact of the mass deaths of the Great War, which were far greater in proportion than in the Second World War.”
Belich emphasises the legacy of returned soldiers who were broken men, “never the same again” in the much-used phrase of the time. And he notes the phenomenon of the “maiden aunt” – women who never married because there just weren’t enough men. Belich concludes simply: “Anzac Day is worth its salt as a commemoration.”
Boland also notes that by emphasising the value of sacrifice, the event has always had political uses. Currently, it constitutes a good example to hold up when politicians “have to ask people to make a few sacrifices.
World War II often came up as a reference point during the Covid lockdowns.” (See “Lockdown Day”, page 34.)
Easily hijacked
Anzac Day still resonates with the wider population. The centenary in 2015 saw what is believed to have been the largest number of people at official events, with an estimated 25,000 at the main ceremony in the national capital, and more than 100,000 turning out for other dawn events around the country.
Accurate figures are hard to come by – the Returned and Services Association (RSA) itself doesn’t keep a record – but anecdotally it is thought that, following the centenary, attendances slowly dwindled before being obliterated completely by the Covid-19 pandemic. They are now slowly growing again.
That so many people found ways to mark Anzac Day during the 2020 lockdown perfectly reflects its central part in the national psyche. Some broke the rules to visit their nearest war memorial and say a quiet prayer. At least one person laid a wreath at his gate. Some observed a minute’s silence where they were. Others stood at the end of their driveways in company with their neighbours and raised a glass to the fallen.
No one spoken to for this story wanted to see Anzac Day disestablished. Writer and conspiracy theory researcher Byron Clark speaks for many across the political spectrum when he says, “I think it is important to have that memorial day for the people who died at Gallipoli and for the New Zealand soldiers who have died in conflicts since.”
Like many, he does not buy into the venerable notion of Gallipoli as the cradle of the nation’s independence, partly because “I think that’s easily adopted by the far right, whether that’s talking about fighting for freedom and for your country, or whether it’s putting it into a wider anti-Islam narrative.”
Clark notes that the conspiracy theory-driven Counterspin Media “launched on Anzac Day in 2021. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they picked that day. There was the roadshow after the occupation of Parliament grounds, which they called the ‘Let’s Not Forget’ tour and had a stylised poppy [logo]. They’re really trying to draw on that imagery and nationalist rhetoric.”
In another analysis of how more mainstream political purposes are served by Anzac Day, Massey and Auckland university researchers showed in a paper that appeared in the journal Nations and Nationalism that what is left out can be as important as what is included.
The “day subsequently expanded to cover all conflicts that New Zealanders have been involved in; however, to date, there has been little acknowledgment of the brutal civil wars waged by the Crown against Māori between 1843 and 1915″.
The paper points out that, “Early themes of sacrifice and Empire merged into a ‘coming of age’ narrative for the colony and for the British dominion that became an independent nation”. It “reflects a belief that nations are made through war; that sacrifice and death, infused with heroism and bravery, are core qualities that constitute national maturity” and notes, “These understandings and a … sense of unity, alongside the lack of critical reflection in education curricula, insulate the day against overt criticism.”
‘People of the treaty’
As already observed, there are other claimants for the title of our national day, both of which can claim an inclusiveness that Anzac Day struggles to achieve.
James Belich, for one, argues against the notion “that a nation like ours can get away with one national day”. But if any occasion is to deserve that title, it seems self-evident that it should include all the people of that nation.
Problematically, at some level there is a suggestion surrounding Anzac Day that you – or your ancestors – had to be there. And Waitangi Day in particular would seem to exclude those who were not part of the country at the time.
That said, Waitangi Day is the answer many will give if asked to name our national day. Many countries commemorate their past, but the Treaty of Waitangi is an event unique to our history. Didn’t you have to be there, though? How can its observance include those New Zealanders who were not among the groups who signed the treaty?
Easily, according to community worker and activist Denis O’Reilly. A Pākehā steeped in tikanga, he is an advocate for the increasingly popular notion of tangata tiriti – the people of the treaty – which is how he identifies himself.
“You’ve got your indigenous people and then you’ve got the rest of us,” he says. It’s a way of looking at the nation that he sees encapsulated in Napier’s Unity Day (see “Unity Day”, page 32).
Tracey McIntosh (Ngāi Tūhoe) also finds value in the notion of tangata tiriti. “The more we start thinking about tangata tiriti and tangata whenua, the more those ideas are socialised and become part of a collective and inclusive identity,” says the Auckland University professor of indigenous studies. “If we think of what Te Tiriti allowed, such as thinking of it as the first immigration policy, it allowed all of us to come together in this nation.”
Bönisch-Brednich also thinks there is plenty of room for people who aren’t Christian and Pākehā or Māori to join in Waitangi Day “because we are all living in this country. And we all should have a place to participate. And we all should honour the treaty.”
Nevertheless, the day has, to put it mildly, some baggage. For Māori, obviously, this includes the number of ways in which the treaty was broken. And for Pākehā, perhaps less reasonably, the fact that Māori are still sore about that.
In an article that appeared in the journal Political Psychology, Massey University researcher Alex McConville and others studied feelings around the event and found that “for Waitangi Day, Pākehā participants frequently expressed feelings of irritation, frustration, or engaged in … practices of anger, alongside being muddled, conflicted, lost, or quite simply confused”. They noted these issues did not arise around Anzac Day.
Stellar candidate
Nor should they arise in connection with the other contender for a national day that seems to rise above problems of identity, inclusiveness or racial conflict. It’s an indication of its wide popularity that a leading campaigner for acknowledgment of Matariki, astronomer Rangi Mātāmua, was named the 2023 Kiwibank New Zealander of the year Te Pou Whakarae o Aotearoa.
“Commemorative events narrate history, which is usually a contested history,” notes Tracey McIntosh. “But Matariki is a celestial event. Literally universal. It’s not commemorative, but it does create space to remember those that we’ve lost in the last year and to think of the future. This ability to connect and to do it in different ways might be one of the most powerful elements.”
It also doesn’t have a specific religious component. Boland thinks a completely secular national day would be hard to imagine. “New Zealand is not an atheist country. It’s post-Christian. It relies on Christian motifs. And to take those out would really be a struggle.”
Although Matariki doesn’t require any specific beliefs, with its focus on the stars, it at least evokes some awe and an awareness of something beyond and bigger than us.
And it is inclusive without having to try: everyone stares at the same sky and sees the same stars at the same time.
“Matariki really speaks to me about connections for all whānau, Māori, non-Māori, those new to the country and those who have been here for generations,” says McIntosh. “It seems to be an incredible opportunity, which a lot of people responded to strongly.”
She sees it as showing how “drawing on very old knowledge and ways of thinking can generate new ways of understanding ourselves”. Because it follows the lunar calendar, “there is a real element that brings higher environmental awareness, spatial awareness, awareness of where we are”.
It’s also significant on an international level. The fact that it is one of the first indigenous-based national holidays in the world is itself symbolic of the evolving bicultural identity of Aotearoa New Zealand.
The stars are ancient; the holiday is a year old. Whether or not Matariki will become the pre-eminent national holiday, taken to the hearts of the population in a way that Anzac Day or Waitangi Day almost but can’t quite manage to do, remains to be seen.
There are pitfalls to be avoided. Warnings have already been sounded against the commercialisation of the day, with the prospect of “Matariki sales”. Hopefully, it will be a long time before we hear someone say: “I can’t believe it’s only January and the Matariki decorations are already in the shops.”
Lockdown Day
A national day should have at its centre a unifying national myth, says Nick Agar, professor of ethics in Te Kura Aronui – School of Social Sciences at the University of Waikato. Hence his proposal of a Lockdown Day, in a piece published on newsroom.co.nz: “I see in New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 the makings of a potent and unifying national myth … The great thing about a national myth of the Kiwi lockdown is it wouldn’t follow the familiar pattern of glorifying war.”
What was he thinking?
In part, he says, three years after the original piece appeared and still of that view, he was thinking of all the people who are left out of Anzac Day.
He would like, for instance, to see the bit players of history celebrated. “In the first lockdown, people were celebrating supermarket workers and cleaners. The nurses, who were lower on the pecking order than the doctors, were celebrated. And they were heroic. They went to work and they had not enough PPE. Like the poor diggers, they went above and beyond.”
The point of Lockdown Day would be not to glorify the dead, but to celebrate the lives that were not lost in the pandemic. “Maybe if we could focus on how, if we hadn’t done anything, this is how many people probably would have died.”
And it would include everyone in the country at the time – all ethnicities, political viewpoints, ages, classes and levels of involvement.
Agar says we have tried to universalise Anzac Day by extending it to include immigrants, who “get a narrative that says, ‘Well, this was for you, too, because you’re a New Zealander now.’ "
One psychological obstacle to a Lockdown Day is the way the pandemic response has been politicised, he says. “If you tried to say, let’s have a Lockdown Day, then you’re obviously on the side of the politics at the time. It’s obviously code for ‘vote Labour’.” But a major focus of the celebration would be the collective effort that was made. “That first lockdown, I thought, ‘Whoa, this is a people working together.’” And that could be inspirational when facing an even greater challenge. “There’s this thing called climate change, which will call for different kinds of effort. When, finally, we do something about climate change, it will also call for sacrifices from all sections of society.”
James Belich is the keynote speaker at Scarred Nations, “an international symposium that investigates the implications, reconciliations, and legacies of intrastate conflict”, at Auckland Museum on April 20.