Each time a new dawn
Each Anzac Day brings with it a reminder of the need to balance constancy and change, writes
Many children had their ears covered, by their own hands or their parents’, when the big gun detonated the quiet of Invercargill’s Anzac Day dawn service. A gentle word of warning over the loudspeakers had readied them.
But every year it happens anyway – whenever those guns sound the sonic violence that tears the air is not just so loud, but so profoundly alien to our lives, that the quiet tone of the service momentarily succumbs to a buzz of reactive startlement.
This year one child, in a green hood, seemed to have heard more than enough. She was ready to leave.
She had made no fuss. Ushered by her comforting adult she just quietly slipped away from the crowded cenotaph grounds with hands still clamped resolutely over her ears.
She lives in a country where, generally, it is that easy to walk away from gunfire. It won’t follow you. Not all countries are like that. And it hasn’t happened without sacrifice.
Anzac Day is sanctified throughout New Zealand. Whether or not we title it our national day, it speaks to our hearts. No other day is quite so pained and personal.
In the pre-dawn darkness, people stood shoulder to shoulder, not because that made any symbolic gesture, but because it just felt the best way to keep a bit warmer, even drier. When needs be, you stand closer to one another. In ceremonies and in extremities.
Elsewhere around the province, the scale of things might have been smaller. The emotions were not.
Each Anzac dawn rises on a changed community.
At services nowadays, the ranks of veterans are younger. Just a few from World Wars; far more from later conflicts or what we now daintily call ‘‘peacekeeping’’, as if the reality isn’t what it has always been for those hazarding their own lives – perilous, corrosive, damaging. And cause for our gratitude. Throughout the south, Returned Services Associations, now entering their second collective century, have been going through a time of transition.
These outfits are, in many respects, more individual than we give them credit for.
Though they share a national body, their own character comes through, governed by those at the helm and the different communities they serve.
Some RSAs have been thriving, others struggling for more people to step forward to get involved.
These associations’ futures depend not only on our collective reverence for the past, but on their continued engagement with the wider community – and strong, mutually supportive links with younger veterans.
These veterans are the ones who can bring into the RSA the combination of experience – some of it bitter, some of it uplifting – and a more youthful vigour.
And through that, they can bring the strengthened connection to their communities. That is so very important. These veterans are the ones who can look the rest of us in the eye and answer, as best they can, the questions each rising generation of New Zealanders needs to try to understand; what was the point, what was the cost, what do we need to do better, what do we need to remember?