A Whisper of Dishonour

Sunny.  Again.  Will it ever end?

 

Stopped for coffee and calories at a bakery called Dough, then took the funicular up above the city.  Not much flat land in the city, so in an effort to expand in the hilly suburbs the locals built a cable car.  Started construction in 1899, opened to the public in 1902.  Views from the top superb.

We wandered around the botanical garden, which stretches over 25 hectares, then wound down to the herb and rose gardens.  Unfortunately the rose garden isn’t much in pictures but it was a real trip on site, both the volume of blooms and the insanely esoteric names.

Following almost a full morning of trekking about amongst plants, we cut through the old cemetery towards the CBD for a light lunch.

In the afternoon we returned to Te Papa/The Museum of New Zealand; our tickets were good for 48 hours.  They had an especially good exhibit on Gallipoli which was too crowded on Sunday; it was deeply moving and weird to be in an emotional space with children doing handstands with narrated videos showing thousands of dead bodies.

How to put it?  Completely different than Peter Weir’s movie.  The letters, diaries, quotes, actions and pictures of how the ANZAC brigade suffered during 1915 paint a hugely complex picture of soldiers dedicated to country, their steadfast belief in victory, and valour in conditions where rotting bodies, disease and discomfort were the norm (and the hubris of top brass resulted in thousands of needless deaths).  The only fresh water?  Came from Egypt in benzene cans.  They were literally drinking fire power.  No fresh food.  So many dead bodies, stinking so badly that, at one point during the campaign, there was a 24 hour ceasefire to bury the dead, and reduce the stench, but many of the decomposing bodies fell apart when they tried to move them. Enemies stood side by side in memory of the dead, then retreated to their trenches and continued to fight.

Typhoid (they called it enteric in WWI) was rife, and anyone not suffering from typhoid had dysentery or worse.  Fatigue and lack of nutrition also took its toll; many men, so weak, fell into the latrine, unable to get up.  Add in the flies, from pit latrines and rotting bodies, helmets that didn’t protect from bullets but identified men to the Turks and, well, Coppola could have made a better movie I think.

There was a section on the Maori contingent, their bravery, prayers and efforts to even be included in the ANZAC brigade.  They had a wonderful quote a chief provided to his men in Maori: “It would be better for us all to die, than for a whisper of dishonour to go back home.”  And yet: Who remembers?  Really?  Highly recommended: War and Turpentine a (sort of) recent novel about a man who unearthed his grandfather’s diaries from WWI and contrasts the world he’s raising his son in with the world his grandfather fought to maintain. 

Mid afternoon, given the heat (and the culture) I retired to the hotel pool.

Meanwhile, Stephen went to the New Zealand Portrait Gallery and Wellington Museum.  Here are some of his random pics.

For dinner, after that healthy lunch, we went for pizza, then called it a night, tomorrow being another early travel day.