Acting Principal's Report
Lest We Forget
Tēnā koutou katoa
My grandfather - my mother’s father - went to WW1 on the 12th April 1914, six days after Britain declared war on Germany. My grandfather, John Edward McNulty, was part of the 1400-strong New Zealand Expeditionary Force Advance Party that landed in Apia on 29th April 1914 and executed - without any expected conflict - the capture of German Samoa within the first day. The arrival of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on Sāmoa shores was a significant action that started a closer, long term relationship between the two countries that has developed and strengthened into what it is today.
My grandfather went on to fight in Europe and was wounded in Bois Grenier, France on the 7th February 1917. I knew my grandfather until he died when I was 15 at age 94. He walked on crutches the rest of his life and suffered great pain and deafness as a result of the war. My mother often spoke about the impact the war had on her family. On the anniversary of WW1 in 2014, all New Zealand war documents were made available online and it was only in the lockdown, with the help of an enormous book from the school library, that I was able to retrace his steps exactly and found he was hospitalised only 18 km from where his own brother, Vincent James McNulty, was killed in action on 26th August 1917.
The legacy of war is felt still in New Zealand and soon we are to see the Archibald Baxter Memorial Garden come to fruition at the top of Albany Street. In July 1917 Archibald Baxter and 13 other conscientious objectors, including two of his brothers, were kidnapped and shipped off to France where Baxter was threatened, beaten, starved and tortured for his refusal to wear a military uniform.
In 2014, the Archibald Baxter Memorial Trust was set up to honour Baxter’s memory, and the courage shown by all New Zealand’s conscientious objectors in all wars, through a memorial peace garden in the heart of Dunedin, an annual peace lecture and ongoing educational work.
Recently our own ex-pupil, Caitlin Duff, as part of a Linguistics and English Humanities internship at Otago University, found previously unknown poems by Archibald Baxter and has collected these into a booklet using original printing press techniques.
It is timely to remember our past, to draw on the present and look to the future. Let us remember all of our wars - those that occurred in our own country as well - and those that are still going on in the home countries of some of our students. Let us take the lessons of our past and build a greater future. Let us reflect on our own conflicts - when we argue or put others down - and be grateful that in this time of peace in our own land, conflict resolution is worth working towards.
"I have suffered to the limit of my endurance, but I will never in my sane senses surrender to the evil power that has fixed its roots like a cancer on the world."
Archibald Baxter
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