Wellington Highlights

Those World War 1 Exhibitions

Saturday and Sunday afternoons, being in Wellington and having heard wonderful positive reports from friends who had visited the historic exhibitions currently on in the city, we went and saw and were conquered!

So what I write here is against the background of respect, admiration, even amazement at the research, scholarship, design skills and sensitivity displayed by both institutions and their staffs.

We visited Te Papa on Saturday afternoon and the Dominion Museum on Sunday. Not enough time to have seen everything, let alone to have read every word on display. 

But we have read a few of the hundreds of books published recently on the same subjects and done our best to get our heads around the masses of information about the war: 1914, New Zealanders in the Great War, the Gallipoli campaign, the battles for Fromelles, and Passchendaele, and the First Day of the Somme.

Podium winners

We had heard lots about the Weta Workshop models, the huge replicas of men in action, and the reconstructions of weaponry at Te Papa. But the reality of these exhibits was enough to blow us away, down to the sweat on the brows, the hair on the legs and the barbed wire.

The atmosphere of a French town 100 years ago in the first few metres of the Dominion Museum exhibition made one feel that it was indeed an old part of France we were walking through.

We took one or two shots of the more spectacular photos of the Gallipoli campaign; even on the small screen of our mobile phone one in particular is so sharp it is almost unbelievable. We are full of admiration for the curatorial staff who restored that photograph and all the others.

But most impressive to my mind was the model of the Battle of Chunuk Bair. I had read about the models made of the Waterloo battlefield and displayed in Europe at a shilling a time. We had been to Waterloo itself and seen the displays there. But the huge, detailed, incredibly carefully reproduced model of Chunuk Bair showing Malone and his Wellington men is just overwhelming. 200 men from Taranaki took part in that battle and only three survived.

Battlefields galore

I have visited battlefields for many years, quite apart from Waterloo which I have mentioned already.

Around 1970 I took my two children on a trip around the Waikato. We started off at Pukekohe East to look at the bullet holes in the church where our great-great-grandfather was involved defending his farm and that of his neighbours from a Maori skirmishing party in 1863.

Then we explored the Rangiriri site, and took in as much of that as we could. After that we drove on up the Waipa Valley and eventually to Orakau, trying to imagine the mayhem that occurred there.

Later, living in the Bay of Islands, our favourite outing for visitors was to Ruapekapeka, where you can still see the underground shelters which gave protection even from the cannon that Governor Grey's forces had dragged up the Pakaru Road from Derrick's Landing.

And here in New Plymouth we are surrounded by battle sites from the 1860s, from Te Kohia near Waitara to St George's Redoubt down the coast. When we lived at Oakura we passed ten historic sites from the wars between there and New Plymouth each day.

I later had many discussions with an acquaintance who had served in the parachute regiments that took part in the Battle of Arnhem in the second war. 1000 men in his battalion dropped there and less than 100 came out.

Finally, when we were in Europe in 2008 we visited Passchendaele.

Gallipoli

Both versions of Gallipoli are overwhelming. The Dominion Museum's lists of the dead are incredible; one wonders when they will ever stop coming. Every few days through those terrible months there is another page full of names from all parts of the country.

And the summaries of the years through the whole war, each with its memorial archway and the rows of graves stretching away on both sides, take the story to every theatre of that murderous struggle.

However I was left with a question: why have we got two versions of Gallipoli in two different exhibitions? Did the Te Papa team phone the Dominion team one day and say, "We've got a heap of material collected about Gallipoli that we have no room for in our displays. Could you use it in yours?" To my mind the whole experience could have been enhanced by having all the Gallipoli material in one place and the rest of the war covered somewhere else.

Ideally

If you want to absorb as much as you can from the current exhibitions, my suggestion would be to take it slowly. Try starting with the World War I exhibition at the Dominion Museum, over three or four visits.

Once that has sunk in, I would take another two or three visits to get my head around the Gallipoli story at Te Papa, which would enable me to have enough general background to tackle the more detailed version back at the Dominion.

But the last section would take several more visits, probably nearer eight than four, to absorb the mass of details in the photo captions, introductions, lists of casualties, and detailed maps, models and documents.

There could not be a more absorbing way to learn all one could about this most disastrous episode in our history.