Bringing Our Boy Home: The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and Contemporary War Remembrance

Abstract

In November 2004 the remains of an unidentified New Zealand serviceman were brought home from France and placed in the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior outside the National War Memorial in Wellington. A casualty of the First World War, the Unknown Warrior represented one of the almost 30,000 New Zealand war dead buried overseas – 9,000 of whom have no known grave. On Armistice Day 2004 his remains were interred in a specially constructed tomb built to provide a distinctly New Zealand memorial for the country’s servicemen and women. According to its designer, Kingsley Baird, the tomb ‘is an expression of the nation’s memory and a cross-cultural language of remembrance [that] combines Maori and Pakeha ritual, symbolic, and visual elements . . . to express remembrance specific to New Zealand’s contemporary identity.’

The return of the Unknown Warrior was a significant event for New Zealand. An estimated 100,000 people lined the streets of Wellington to watch his casket make its way from Parliament to its final resting place, and the ceremonial programme was broadcast live on national television. In this article I discuss the return of New Zealand’s Unknown Warrior in order to explore how aspects of memory, ritual and commemoration shape contemporary war remembrance. Drawing on comments left in visitor books and on-site interviews with visitors to the memorial, I analyse institutional objectives set out in the design and planning of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, and the political and popular motivations that led to its construction. I argue that visitors combine elements of individual memory, civil remembrance and national commemoration to construct meaning at the Tomb and form connections with the Unknown Warrior. Their responses are influenced by the impact of ‘grassroots’ interest in war remembrance and soldier ancestors, and an understanding of the experience of war and death, public ritual and state involvement in commemoration. This article looks beyond a government-driven ideology of nation-building to throw light on the interplay of memory, state ritual and war commemoration in the construction and public reception of a contemporary war memorial.