Commemoration & cultural history

History is all around us, yet sometimes we just don’t see it. Or we don’t really understand what we are actually looking at. Statues of colonial governors stand dumbly in public parks, their significance – for good or ill – forgotten. Memorials to fallen soldiers of world wars, on the other hand,   are stacked with wreaths and paper poppies on ANZAC Day, yet the meaning of these memorials is not as stable as the tributes in stone make them seem. Commemorations change over time: their popularity ebbs and flows, their rituals of observance morph. Empire Day, once regularly observed, is, like the British Empire itself, a thing of the past: new days, commemorating other pasts, have taken its place.

Tauira in History 352 have been studying the changing nature of Aotearoa New Zealand’s commemorative cultures, especially those established by settlers determined to forge a ‘nation’. They have each chosen a commemorative site or object to blog about. Their choices, and analyses, are collected here, offering a kaleidoscopic, and critical, picture of Auckland’s collective memory.