My Anzac

When I was little, every Anzac Day we'd go up our hill and slide down on bits of cardboard. It was always sunny, and it was always fun. Sometimes I fell off and rolled for a little way on the rocks and the sticks and the dry, slippery grass.

It was a family thing. Me and my brothers, and Mum and Dad, and sometimes my cousins too. It was on our land, our home - the hill with steep sides and huge rocks and the hard dirt track up to the top, eroded with water. The air had the minty smell of pennyroyal, and you could see everything, all the rolling farmland on each side of the river, and the mountains, and the ocean, and the sky.


For those of you who aren't familiar, ANZAC stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps. The first Anzac Day was 25th April, 1916, during the first World War. This marked one year after our soldiers had landed at Gallipoli for that disastrous campaign. Overall around 120,000 men died. Over 2,700 were New Zealanders.

This campaign, this war, this huge loss of life, changed the lives of many people. It changed New Zealand as well. We felt more united as a country, even though we were fighting in a war that shouldn't have happened on behalf of another country. We had been just another of England's colonies before, but after that we started to feel that we were our own nation.

Anzac was a way to remember the dead, and to honour those who had returned from service.  It was a way to stand together, to support each other, as a nation. And now, as other wars have come and gone and come, and as NZ takes part in all different ways, not just combat, Anzac is a place to remember them all.

2014 marks the centenary of the start of World War I.


My great grandfather fought in the war. He fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and was hit with a ball of shrapnel. They dug it out of his back on the beach and filled the wound with iodine  We still have the piece of shrapnel. It looks harmless. My grandpa had it, and gave it to my dad, and he gave it to my oldest brother when he got married last year.

Anzac Day matters to me because of this. I never knew my great grandfather, but the story of his life was such a big part of the lives of two of the most important men I've had in my life - my dad, and my grandpa.

I grew up with stories not about the war, but about my great grandparents, and the childhood that grandpa and my great aunt had. I grew up with stories of farms and shenanigans, and of love, and I grew up with those same things myself.


My grandpa wrote poems about the war, even though it ended before he was sent over. I was obsessed with English war poetry for about a year - Seigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, but never Rupert Brooke (handsome though he may have been). I think about the farms our returned WWI soldiers worked on when they came back, the sheep station my grandpa worked on after his father died, all the land.

Alexander MacKenzie came back from the war, though he died younger than he should have. I never knew him. I didn't meet my great grandmother either. She died just before I was born, but they say when I was a baby I looked up, and in my eyes they saw her gaze.

For a lot of people, I know that Anzac Day is just a holiday. And for me, too, I suppose that it is. I've never been to a Dawn Ceremony. I don't like the word "honour" being used about war. I'm not a patriot. I'm not any kind of activist for any sort of movement.

Anzac Day for me is a piece of who I am. I always remember. I remember the people I love, and these stories we all built ourselves on.


What's Anzac Day to you?