Speak Up-KōrerotiaTeaching war, teaching peace?

10 November 2018

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Over the last four years, there have been commemorations throughout the world to remember the centenaries of various key moments of World War One, particularly major battles. For New Zealand, these major battles include the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign as well as several battles along the western front. 11 November 2018 marks 100 years since the signing of the Armistice, the end of World War One, and so we are currently about to commemoration not the actions and losses of individual battles but of the entire war.

With fighting in Europe, Africa and the Middle East involving soldiers from countries across the globe, World War One was a ‘first’ in terms of its geographical scale as well as in the industrialised forms of warfare employed such as machine guns, gas and tanks. The combination of huge numbers of mobilised soldiers plus advances in technology also resulted in another first: the number of dead. Some historians estimate about 40 million casualties of which perhaps 10 million were military deaths.

The sheer vastness of World War One, particularly in terms of the numbers of dead, makes a compelling argument for remembering and commemorating: We must remember in order to pay homage to those who died as well crucially, so that we remember and don’t repeat history. Yet how much sway does this argument actually have? Remembering World War One and other conflicts has not prevented humankind from resorting time and again to war. So on today’s episode of “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”, I, your host Sally Carlton invite three people who have researched the commemoration and teaching of war and peace to reflect on the question: Does teaching about war translate into teaching about peace?

We will talk firstly with Rowan Light, researcher of ANZAC Day, Australia and New Zealand’s commemoration of Gallipoli. Secondly we will chat with Katerina Standish about her work and on her knowledge of violence

in school curricula, before finishing up with Laura Jones, Education Specialist at Te Papa.

Rowan welcome to the show. It would be fantastic if you could introduce yourself and also a bit about your research, please.

Rowan Hi, I’m a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand history, so I’ve just finished my PhD in the history of ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand and I suppose the PhD came out of a few questions I had when I was studying in Sydney and when I was doing my Honours there on a quite different topic and I was talking to historians at the University of Sydney and some friends and I went along to the ANZAC Day service knowing that’s something we shared with Australians and I was struck by many of the differences. So my research was really asking that question: Well, how much is this something that we share and what are the differences? And I suppose thinking about the 2015 centenary and really asking, “Well how did we get to that point? How do we account for such a huge interest and investment in that centenary which is both financial and emotional and this mixture of personal and all these different energies that have gone into it?”

Sally What were the big differences, according to your research, between Australia and New Zealand’s commemoration of ANZAC Day?

Rowan One of the ways that historians have talked about the difference, the sort of difference in tone and texture of our ANZAC commemoration between Australia and New Zealand, has been on the one hand: OK, we share certain similarities and language and rituals in the way we talk about sacrifice and the values of ANZAC Day - integrity and service - but whereas in New Zealand I think we tend to associate those in a broader kind of way.

Firstly I think we think of those in terms of a relationship between Australia and New Zealand, as something that we share - perhaps speaks more to the kind of global context of World War One - whereas in Australia what is quite clear and striking is the way in which ‘ANZAC’ is really a synonym for ‘Australian’ so there’s a very strong association between national history and what took place at Gallipoli. And so my research really confirmed that in the sense that we really traced how New Zealand’s sort of ANZAC commemoration has taken place in a broader ecosystem. And so that was kind of the second part of my research, was really looking at: If this is something that we share, how has the Australian commemoration shaped New Zealand’s? And what I found was the way in which the Australian state commemoration has exerted quite a profound influence over the way we’ve come to commemorate Gallipoli, particularly in the last 20 years.

Sally As an Australian living in New Zealand, one thing that I’ve noticed when I’ve attended ANZAC Day ceremonies is it seems to be a lot more religious here.

Rowan That’s quite a common observation. One of the ways that I tend to describe the differences: Commemoration is never just one thing, it’s never just official government policy, it’s very much a collection of different groups and institutions and people giving input into how we remember a particular historical event. And where in Australia there’s quite a strong… centralised and quite a strong institutional network through things like the Australian War Memorial, in New Zealand we’ve had quite a… I would describe it as quite a decentralised, quite a local, tradition of ANZAC commemoration.

Sally You’ve mentioned the more centralised approach in Australia versus the more localised approach here, if we can move onto thinking about the teaching of ANZAC Day - and commemoration is in one respect a way of teaching - it would be great to think about how you see the teaching of ANZAC Day through commemoration changing over time?

Rowan We talk about ANZAC Day as this thing but of course it’s changed over time and changes over generations so I suppose it might be helpful to think about well when we see the first formation of ANZAC Day and after the first one in 1916 and then developing over the 1920s, this ANZAC Day emerged as part of a kind of broader tradition of national history within a British and imperial world view, that it sort of inculcates a sense of what it meant to be British, British patriotism, citizen in the empire in the 1920s and 1930s and so we see very much this emphasis on commemoration as this sort of moral pedagogy.

Sally What might be interesting for us to hear is the differences between commemoration in the past, when it was perhaps more led by the RSLs and the RSAs - the veterans themselves - versus how it is now that it is more led perhaps by the state or by education.

Rowan If we look at for example in 1965, we had the 50th anniversary of Gallipoli - and that’s one of the first really big anniversaries and we’re always very interested in anniversaries as these interesting milestones - in 1965, we have in many ways a classic snapshot of how ANZAC commemoration had developed in this 50 years. And one of the rituals that the central protagonist of commemoration was the returned servicemen. In 1965, for example, we have a pilgrimage to Gallipoli run by the RSL, in Australia the Returned Service League and the RSA, the Returned Service Association in the New Zealand counterpart and this is.... They are the main organisers. And there is some government support - so they do ask the government for support - but it’s very limited. What is both the Menzies liberal government in Australia and the Holyoake national government in New Zealand are very reticent about getting involved because they see the role of the RSL and RSA as the primary organiser. In fact, one of the interesting concerns of the state at the time is that if they set a precedent for becoming financial supporters of commemoration, that might lead down the track to more commitments - and there’s an interesting irony in that given what we’ve seen in the last

four years.

So the 50th anniversary in 1965 was very much the commemoration being about the returned servicemen as an exemplar of the solider citizen and so that tradition holds up particularly in New Zealand for quite a while. But even in 1990, the 75th anniversary of Gallipoli again, is kind of seen as the important moment. Again, the New Zealand government says well the primary organiser here has to be the RSA so that the RSA produces kind of the first educational kit - wonderfully called ‘The muddle that moulded the nation’ and it was effectively like a video and an education kit for teachers which was sent to schools to be used in classroom contexts and that’s the first attempt to go from schools having students attend ANZAC Day (and so a broader community sense of commemoration as teaching) to a shift towards thinking about national history and in terms of military heritage.

That kind of very much connects with changes in the 1990s which is when we start to see a big discussion about the role of history in the national curriculum.

Sally So I guess, thinking about from the 1990s onwards through to today and the place that Gallipoli/ANZAC Day/World War One hold in New Zealand’s education: Is it a big part, do you think? And is it too big? Or not big enough?

Rowan Well it’s an interesting question, because part of the problem of talking about the teaching of any given subject in New Zealand schools is that we actually don’t have great data about that. And the difficulty is, on the one hand we have quite an open curriculum which gives teachers and schools and communities a lot of flexibility in what they decide to teach and still attempts to survey and really get some good data on what’s been taught.

I think that in Australia there has been a really interesting debate about this where there has been since the 1990s in particular and the early 2000s under the John Howard liberal government where there was a strong push to connect Australia’s military heritage with national history. That was really led through the Department of Veteran Affairs and in particular if we’re thinking about well commemoration is never one thing in isolation, it’s always about a broader ecosystem of commemoration, and within the Department of Veteran Affairs we have something like the Australian War Memorial is sort of situated as a key cultural institution in Australia.

There’s been a big debate in Australia about the appropriateness of this and why do we have one department when you would expect the RSA to want to promote historical narratives which supports their cause, their community? The question becomes, well why do we give preference to one - in this case, the Department of Veteran Affairs? Why was one department given the resources to push a particular historical narrative?

Why not the Department of Immigration or Environment or Aboriginal Affairs? So these are questions being asked in Australia - the need to be critical about state narratives and very conscious of, I suppose, the work of memory, remembrance which does imply forgetting - so when we put energy and effort into remembering, that necessarily means that we’re forgetting other things. And I think an interesting way we can complicate the picture of 1915 in terms of thinking about the implications of what we decide to remember is very much when we think about the history of violence and genocide would be the Armenian genocide which is something at an official level we don’t really give enough recognition to, despite the fact that scholars have already established a fair consensus that the landing at Gallipoli was a key trigger for the Armenian genocide which begins more or less on the say day, 25 April. So it does provide one example in the way in which… That what we choose to remember and invest in our commemoration can silence and can obscure other histories of violence.

Sally And I think to add to that point: Whereas it is in some ways ‘easy’ to remember Gallipoli from a New Zealand perspective, remembering the Armenian genocide has a whole load of very difficult political relationship issues that come with it.

Rowan Yes precisely because of the contemporary politics and our relationship with the Republic of Turkey and who do not recognise the genocide, precisely. So we see the entanglements and the politics of commemoration and that they are never neutral… That these narratives that we tell each other on ANZAC Day are never neutral.

Sally In Australia and New Zealand national curricula, teaching about World War One and Gallipoli and ANZAC Day almost comes with a moral lesson - which I suppose the commemoration itself does, as well - and this idea that you’ve got to be taught about it or not to forget about it. Are there dangers, perhaps, inherent in teaching about war?

Rowan That’s a fraught question and I suppose stepping back and we look at the history of history teaching and history in Australia and New Zealand, sort of one of the promises of history is that it does provide this moral pedagogy.

There was a strong tradition about history was crucial to that moral enterprise of empire and ensuring that Australians are British Australians and British New Zealanders would see themselves connected in that broader project of empire and we see that certainly in how things like the New Zealand Wars were taught and commemorated from about the 1880s up until the 1930s, a story of Māori and Pakeha coming together from this violent moment in our history but coming together and forming a unity, a national unity and very much became a foundational myth of our race relations, a crucial kind of cultural narrative up until the 1960s and 1970s when it started to fall apart and shown to be a bit hollow. And this is again a debate in Australia: We’ve seen a lot in Australia about the

promise of history as a civic education.

I suppose my tendency is to see… There is certainly that aspect of history but history in many ways is less about the familiar and more about the unknown and actually inviting students to consider not simply the narratives of their communities and their families in a way which can be quite empowering - because I think that’s what history provides, that’s the way that the past provides those meetings and relationships in the present - but I think one of the promises of history is also precisely in its ability to question orthodoxies and to look at things differently. So rather than simply looking at a set of values which we share but also giving students the critical tools to be able to question those and think about how they’ve changed and how they’ve developed.

So for me, something we need to give more air time to is the history of protest on ANZAC Day and something which we often forget about. And in fact a couple of years ago, if you remember, there was a bit of a moment of public debate where there was some protesting on ANZAC Day. To me what was interesting is that we’d actually kind of forgotten that we actually have a really rich tradition of protest on ANZAC Day and the debate: Was is it appropriate on this sacred occasion?

Sally So just to finish off a final question for you: What would you like to see happen in terms of teaching about war and teaching about peace in New Zealand, whether that be through commemoration or education?

Rowan Yes well it’s interesting, isn’t it, we’re at the end of the centenary where we’ll be talking about how we’ve commemorated World War One for many years. I think we’ll be looking back and sort of asking, “Well, did we do it right? Did we get it right? Did we miss a bit of an opportunity?” and I do wonder if we have. You just look at the Ministry’s [for Culture and Heritage] sort of World War 100 website and we’re coming up to 11 November, the Armistice, and there’s not much going on and I think in many ways partly that’s practical and financial that we’ve exhausted ourselves. I think at the end of this four year slog and we committed a lot in those first two years really about Gallipoli and we see that in our national museum, Te Papa, the decision to have one exhibition, extraordinary commitment of resources and space to Gallipoli and I think the important thing to remind ourselves is that we make war and we teach war; they’re actions, we invest in them.

Similar thing with peace; we make peace, it doesn’t just happen. And I think the value of teaching peace is it provides our students with the critical skills and a vocabulary and a conceptual framework for thinking about how we can actually live in peace and how we can work through differences? and the way in which history can provide those examples and meetings and relationships in the past, that we can draw on in the present. So all of this is quite interesting when we’re coming into more of a debate about how do we commemorate things like the New Zealand Wars which were an important part of our public commemoration 100

years ago under different circumstances but how do we grapple and come to terms with this, another history of violence in our country, one which is more local than perhaps the foreign fields of World War One and therefore a little bit more uncomfortable.

Sally You’ve raised a really excellent point with the difference in how we look at particularly Gallipoli but World War One more broadly and the New Zealand Wars and the vastly different coverage, I suppose, that they get. I think it’s a really important point.

I’d like to say thank you very much for coming in to today, Rowan, and for sharing your vast wealth of knowledge on ANZAC Day across the Tasman, thank you very much.

MUSIC BY GUSTAV HOLT – THE PLANETS – PART ONE: MARS, THE BRINGER OF WAR

Sally We’re talking now with Dr. Katarina Standish, Deputy Director of the National Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago and she’s also a researcher of peace in international curricula. I thought, Katarina, if you could just introduce yourself and a little bit about the work you do particularly, if you wouldn’t mind, focusing on the key findings from your work about pedagogy and the teaching of war and peace.

Katarina I basically focus my work in peace and conflict studies around three areas. One is looking at elements of peacebuilding in mainstream education and peace education is a form of peacebuilding. One of my other areas is looking at life-ending acts and one of my other areas is looking at what’s considered meta violence or the connections between cultural structure and direct forms of violence in society so those reinforcing aspects of it. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m an expert on New Zealand pedagogy but I can tell you I’ve done an analysis of the curricula statements for both the Te Whāriki Early Childhood Education as well as the New Zealand Curriculum Years 1-13 and what I’ve done is I’ve analysed those for three different elements. The first one is recognising violence, the second one is transforming violence but doing so non-violently, and the third aspect is looking at what kind of aspects are in place to prevent and/or intervene in violence when it’s in front of us.

So I would be happy to share my findings with you and I was just going to preface this by saying that New Zealand, like most countries in the world, has a mainstream education system meaning the majority of students gain the same or similar forms of education. There are always special character education or speciality schools etc. but mainstream education in New Zealand is what I looked at and I looked at the English language medium because that’s the language that I’m most comfortable in.

So when I analysed New Zealand it was part of a larger programme that I was working on called the Peace Education Curricula Analysis Project and that’s an international and comparative piece of research that I’m

doing and it’s available online 100% transparent, if anybody is interested it’s pecaproject.org and the idea is to look at mainstream education for peace education because peace education is typically considered to be sort of a fringe or fragment form of education, something that’s kind of an add-on or a bit sidelined but I wanted to take a look at what kind of peace education elements were actually already present in mainstream education because the reality is that in most instances you actually do find peace education elements in so-called mainstream education, so-called non-peace educations. And so I looked at that.

But I will say that I was interested to find that having done about 10 different countries, New Zealand seemed to have a very interesting divide in terms of what I consider in my research to be element one which is recognition of violence. And the reason why recognition of violence is important is because you can’t transform violence if you don’t see it first.

So what I was looking for were instances in the curriculum where violence is recognised and when I analysed for instance the New Zealand 1 - 13 Curriculum - and this is the main curriculum statement for most students who attend schooling in this country - I found only one statement that recognised violence and it’s really short so I could read it out for you. The statement is, “This curriculum is non-sexist, non-racist and non-discriminatory. It ensures that students’ identities, languages, abilities and talents are recognised and affirmed and that their learning needs are addressed.”

So, as I wrote in my research, that despite the sort of Creda cur, there’s no content in Year 1 - 13 that pertains to students gaining aptitudes of assessing conflict or violence; that violence is intentional, undesirable and avoidable. And as the sole statement regarding violence in the Curriculum, it specifically recognises cultural and structural forms of violence by looking at sexism and racism and discrimination, but it leaves direct forms of violence absent in that statement. And so if you were looking at whether or not it was important to differentiate between the three, in my field we look at cultural violence (these are world views), structural violence (which are sort of incarnations of held world views) and direct violence (which are actually physical acts or threats of harm, so these are what we would consider to be direct forms of violence). And the statement in the New Zealand 1 - 13 Year, it says the Curriculum is without sexist or racist or discriminatory statement but it makes no mention about what desirable society should be and in addition to that it doesn’t mention direct violence at all and so in my analysis the answer for my outcome was either it’s difficult for them to represent direct violence discursively - which was surprising to me - or it doesn’t consider direct forms of violence undesirable but sexism and racism, yes.

Then conversely, in the Te Whāriki Early Childhood Curricula statement, it specifically states that children have a right to protection from physical and mental or emotional abuse and injury, that it’s really important

children be protected from rough handling and that they think about the importance of not harming others, and that message has no echo after early childhood education, unfortunately. So it’s important to notice this from my perspective because school systems are basically reflectors and generators of our values and so if violence isn’t being recognised, we are limited in our ability to actually address it, prevent it or intervene in it which is a very important practice where if there’s violence happening in front of you, you actually know what to do, you know how to transform it.

So from my analysis of New Zealand there’s a lot of room for adding the ability for us to recognise violence in society around us and then transform it hopefully.

Sally Goodness, that’s pretty deep stuff. That’s actually quite upsetting to hear that.

Katarina Yeah and it’s interesting because there seems to be… I think from some of the research that I’ve been doing, there seems to be a very similar disconnect in Commonwealth countries like Canada, England, Australia, Scotland etc. in the analysis that I’ve done. There seems to be a real resistance to taking a stand on the realities of violence. We have this fence-sitting where education systems are really happy to talk about wellness and wellbeing but at the same time they don’t address things that are actually inhibiting our wellness and wellbeing in society in terms of interpersonal violence, self-harming and in terms of these larger grand narratives of what I call law education or organised violence that’s considered legitimate, so it’s very challenging.

Sally What do you think is the implication of this, then, for education and society more broadly?

Katarina The implication of…?

Sally The lack of recognition of it in the curriculum.

Katarina Right, I think it is two things. Number one, I think, it gives us a bit of cognitive dissonance meaning it’s confusing because in one respect when we don’t recognise violence it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, it means that we’re not being valued and alerting ourselves to its presence. So there seems to be a sort of… I’m not sure what the term would be but like a record skipping when it gets to that topic.

We can talk about all kinds of other things and we talk about socialised learning and the idea that we learn as young people what to care about and what to value by what we learn in school, we do learn a lot of it in the home but we also learn things and part of it in what’s called secondary socialisation out in the world, out in schools, community groups etc. So when have this missing or this gap, this space that’s where violence recognition could be, we also don’t mobilise to address it and so in some instances there’s sort of these smaller grassroots attempts to bring more

awareness to certain kinds of violence and in New Zealand you can certainly see it with different programmes, campaigns they are looking at addressing, self-harming and suicide or looking at interpersonal violence, domestic violence etc. and definitely binge drinking.

But there is a disconnect when it comes to our curriculum in schools and the reason why I think that’s important is because you can’t tell people violence isn’t acceptable and then commemorate and celebrate war which is organised violence and not expect people to not think or to have some sort of dis-ease about that.

The way that I think about it myself is that it can be a little disturbing when we look at how violence in our society and in New Zealand is very similar to Canada’s way, so sort of dissects legitimate violence from illegitimate violence. So if the police or military are doing it, it’s OK, and if an individual does it it’s not OK. I think that it’s very challenging because we teach students in many, many ways that violence isn’t OK but then at the same time we turn around and we have these large milestones of the year that are basically all set up to commemorate war and that becomes a major part of mobilising our identity and it’s a major part about creating… that imagined community which nationalism does and education systems are vehicles of this kind of nationalism.

As I say, they don’t tell you how to think, they tell you what to think about. So when we go to school, if we’re looking at creating a society that’s going to be non-violent, it’s quite challenging to think about the fact that we won’t necessarily achieve that if one of the things we’re doing is teaching children about war, war history.

And then the offshoots of that which I think are quite important as well - incarnations of violence in school curriculum, there’s what are called alienations where people don’t feel that their education relates to their culture, to their language and to their own experience of history. This idea of people being somehow on the outside of education or that by… The example, if we talk about history education and war history specifically, there’s winners and losers, there’s people that come out as part of victors and people that come out as part of the losers on that side. New Zealand is becoming increasingly multicultural so what does it mean when someone sits down in class and is part of the ‘wrong’ group? What kind of abilities there for you to identify which are culture? This is probably grander than the notion you’re speaking about right now but this is one of the reasons why people become radical, this is one of the reasons why people… Forms of extremist violence because they don’t feel they belong.

So when we, as I said, learn about parts of history that don’t problematise war, we actually end up legitimising it and when we legitimise organised violence, which is what war is, how do we then become people who can then legitimately delegitimise other kinds of violence? So I think we need to get off the fence and decide that we want

to be non-violent which means that when we start to talk about violence in education, violence in terms of our curriculum, not meeting necessarily the needs of the students that are in class but also more importantly hiding violence in order to create this national identity, I think we have a lot of challenges and we could certainly do better.

Sally And just to finish up then, what would be your advice, what do you think should be happening in the classroom in terms of changing this?

Katarina Well I teach in tertiary education so when I teach my students about war education and that idea of legitimate versus illegitimate violence, my students are really struck by this. It can be very challenging but as I said, as someone who teaches at university, I teach about violence, I actually do teach about physical violence, abuse, structural violence, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, classism and also that kind of idea of violence in education - that alienating violence, education that erases us, ignores, derides or dismisses us - and I do all that because alienating violence is their form of dehumanisation. And so I don’t teach early childhood education and I don’t teach primary and secondary school but I think the message has to be humanisation, it has to be a place where we recognise that the role we should be taking as pedagogues in education, particularly mainstream education, is not sort of support this narrative of who we are but actually who we need to be to each other on a day-to-day basis.

So if we want non-violent homes, we don’t just have to mirror non-violent behaviour, we have to teach non-violence because if we don’t learn non-violence you don’t use it. Violence is all around students, they see it everywhere. It’s not just in their real lives, it’s online, and in order for them to be able to muster ways to counter it, to engage with it, to critique it and to transform themselves away from it, they need to know it’s coming.

So there’s all kinds of concern about certain subject matters and age-appropriate learning and all those kinds of things and again, as I said, I teach adults so I generally give them one warning and that’s kind of it but when you live in a world that has its blinders on and isn’t looking for things, number one or number two you’re giving people very confusing messages. I think you have a challenge.

I would like to see violence prevention and intervention training from the age of five, I think it’s very important that we learn how to prevent violence before it happens and there’s a myriad of ways to do that but also I think equally important, particularly in secondary schools and older, is this idea of intervention training which is bystander training which is when it’s happening right in front of you what do you do? There’s various programmes out there that look at sharing that kind of information as well as peer support, as well as having a national message that says, No it’s not OK.

We have these wonderful adverts on the television that I’m seeing about it’s not OK to hit your wife, it’s not OK to hit your kids - OK, but why then is it OK to have ANZAC biscuits and poppies as well? Why do we celebrate one kind of violence but not another? I think we need to get on the same message and I think that non-violence should be that message.

Sally Perfect, that was a fantastic way of summing it all up.

MUSIC BY GUSTAV HOLT – THE PLANETS – PART TWO: VENUS, THE BRINGER OF PEACE

Sally We’re speaking now with Laura Jones, who is Museum Education Specialist at Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum. Laura, thank you so much for joining us.

Laura You’re welcome, lovely to be here.

Sally To start with if you could please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the work that you do.

Laura I actually have an arts specialism and a history specialism as part of my brief but I deliver to all of the programme. I’ve got a long background in teaching, mainly in the UK, in London and in Cambridge. I’ve also taught in Spain and I taught a little bit here in New Zealand and generally upper primary and going into the intermediate age group is where I have most experience.

I’ve been working at Te Papa for nearly three years and though I sort of develop programmes which relate to art, I’ve also helped to develop programmes which relate to Gallipoli, I certainly spend a lot of time talking to students, taking them on tours and delivering education programmes through that space in Te Papa. A very popular exhibition space.

Sally The Gallipoli exhibition is called ‘The Scale of our War’ with the giant figures?

Laura That’s right yes.

Sally Was that the only World War One-related exhibition at Te Papa?

Laura Yes.

Sally It would be really good to hear about… Now that, I guess, we’re coming to the end of the centenary, how you feel the exhibition has been received? Do we have an idea of visitor numbers, reactions to the exhibition and that sort of thing?

Laura I wish I could actually give a figure but I know the visitor numbers are in the millions. It’s been one of the most popular exhibitions that Te Papa has put on. As you say, it was initially designed to be up to four years to

commemorate the 100 years since the start and finish of World War One There’s actually every potential that it will be up for longer and that’s largely in part down to the fact that it has been incredibly well received with a whole variety of audiences and what’s interesting is that it does seem to touch a wide demographic range of people, national visitors and international visitors included.

I think what people respond to a lot is the emotionality of the exhibition, the fact that there’s an attempt to talk about this particular conflict, Gallipoli, through the eyes, if you like, and thoughts of these… as you term them, sort of giant figures that are in the exhibition. And I think that approach seems to have worked very well, well received.

Sally And you know that, I guess, from the comments and visitors’ books?

Laura Comments and visitor books. At the end of the exhibition you can make comments on poppies and put them into the final figure and those are collected and stored and will be read and collated. I’m sure somebody will be doing some research into that.

Sally Goodness that’s a large job in itself, isn’t it?

Laura Absolutely, there will be thousands and thousands of those red poppies.

Sally You take tour groups around; how do people react?

Laura In general of course, as the educator, I’m taking through school students and usually I would say those are Years 5 to 13 so to put that into common parlance that’s probably about 10 year olds up until 17/18 year olds, and of course with them are their teachers and any adults that are along as well. It is interesting; in general, I find that in terms of giving somewhat a non-traditional narrative, it’s actually well received by students.

I don’t know but I imagine that it’s quite interesting for them to have somebody talk about the concept in a different way compared to how it’s usually talked about. They actually listen very well and really engage with the kind of provocations that I bring up throughout our journey. The feedback from teachers and other adults is that it’s well received as well and I’m often aware that as I’m delivering my education programmes through Gallipoli with school students, that other members of the public often kind of shadow me and occasionally come up to me and say it’s really interesting to hear you talk about Gallipoli in this way. It could be that for some visitors they may find it too challenging but I haven’t actually received any verbal feedback that tells me that but I can imagine that possibly sometimes some of the things I say are possibly some people find a little challenging.

Sally Can you give us some examples of what you say that perhaps might be conceived as a bit more provocative?

Laura You come into part of the exhibition where there’s a projection onto a 3D topographical map and it shows the landing at Gallipoli and I gather students around and we talk about who was there. We talk about the British being there and the ANZAC troops, the New Zealanders and the Australians, and we talk about the French being there and the Turks being there and I also make a point that actually also the Canadians and there were Indian troops there as well. Then what I do is I ask the students, I say, “Well why were the Turks there?” It’s quite interesting, there’s a heartbeat sometimes, just a little pause and sometimes a little bit longer and usually pretty quickly though a student puts their hand up and says, “Because it was their country” and then of course that just opens up that narrative around the fact that actually, we were the invading forces and often it’s not talked about in that way but of course Gallipoli was a part of Turkey and when the Allied Troops landed they were invading a foreign land. Then of course I can talk about how the Turkish soldiers were lined up on the top of the hill and were firing down at the troops trying to make their way up and actually talk about the fact that of course the Turkish soldiers were defending their land just as New Zealanders, I often say to them, would defend their land if New Zealand were invaded.

Now immediately, very early on, I’ve just given them a different lens to view Gallipoli through and I think that’s actually very, very powerful and that’s one example of where I do get quite a few adults gathering around me, other visitors to the exhibition listening into this, and I’m occasionally aware when I read their faces that they actually themselves had not thought about it in that way too. It’s a matter of objective fact but it’s just a very good example of how when you just give people a different lens to look through, it actually opens up the conversation in a different way.

Sally Yeah great, it’s good to make people think about these things.

Laura Absolutely, yes.

Sally You mentioned that that’s an objective fact, the land was being invaded. I’m interested in the idea of subjectivity as well and exhibitions being curated, whatever stories are chosen are chosen by somebody or multiple people.

Laura Yes.

Sally The idea that whatever we’re seeing in the exhibition has been carefully selected.

Laura I absolutely agree with you and certainly when I’ve got older students, without a doubt I make reference to that as we move through the exhibition and also at the end.

One of the ways that I make reference to it - which again I think is quite

powerful, and I do this with younger children as well, - is there’s one female figure in the exhibition. She’s the nurse, Lottie Le Galais, and after I’ve spoken a bit about Lottie and about her experiences and why she’s crying, I then just come out from that space and then say to them, “OK, Lottie is the only female figure in the exhibition and she’s crying and she has a lot to cry about, undeniably, but there are all of these men in the exhibition and none of them are crying.” I then turn to the students and I say, “Do you think that means that men didn’t cry?” and again very, very quickly the students are just… A chorus, no of course they did, they feel it to be true… By the later stage in the exhibition, they feel they’ve got plenty to cry about and so then I ask them to contribute ideas as to what they would have cried about and they come up with the idea of being homesick, the idea of seeing their friends being killed in front of them, the idea of actually feeling hopeless and feeling trapped or being hurt themselves, all of these are really good reasons as to why men would have cried. And of course again, we know they did cry, we know this through diary entries and letters home so we’ve got the evidence. I then turn to them and say, “Now, in this exhibition we’ve chosen not to have men cry, what messaging do you think that gives you?” and again I’m doing this with older students. They think about it in terms of, well it does tend to give the idea that men are staunch, men are just standing strong in some way and despite the fact that it is undeniably a very emotional exhibition, it’s interesting that none of the men have actually been shown crying.

I think in doing that I’m getting the students to reflect on the fact that the group that put the exhibition together made a decision not to have anyone crying. In doing so, of course, that’s a subjective decision: Actually how realistic a portrayal are you giving, I would argue, of the experience if you don’t actually show that? I just made the point that this exhibition is a bit like a book. They need to think about books and question them as sources, question how they’ve been written, and they need to question information how it’s presented within exhibitions as well in the same way. I think that’s a very, very powerful message because then you are sending away students hopefully actually starting to question how information is presented to them and let’s face it, that’s actually a great life lesson anyway.

Sally Definitely. I think what you’re talking about with the men not crying is kind of upholding stereotypical values of masculinity, in a way.

Laura Yes.

Sally And I guess my crux question for you is: Do you think that presenting an exhibition about, in this case Gallipoli, but war in general, is encouraging people to look beyond war to peace?

Laura That’s very tricky. I think the focus of this exhibition, the aim is really to immerse you in the awfulness of Gallipoli in some way and I don’t think its brief is really necessary to talk about what happened after the conflict.

However I would be very interested to see whether other exhibitions do that. I would be hopeful that that narrative is going to be brought out later on this year and into next year as we start to talk about the influenza epidemic. So I have to say if I’m completely honest that no, I don’t think this exhibition leads us into that conversation about peace. My feeling is that people are ready for that conversation now, there’s been a lot of talk about Gallipoli of course and World War One and I think people are ready for some alternative narratives and I hope that that’s going to be coming up because actually talking about the influenza epidemic leads you into thinking about why the flu spread so rapidly because everybody was so debilitated and their resistance was so low because the whole world was shattered really by World War One and populations were decimated in countries and that allowed the flu epidemic to spread so quickly and easily. That does allow you to open up conversations around what happened after the war ended.

Sally Just my final question. We interviewed Dr. Katarina Standish before, who researches violence in school curricula internationally, and one of the comments that she made was that she finds it quite difficult to reconcile the teaching of war with the teaching of non-violent messages - the idea that violence is legitimised in some spaces but not in others - and I guess just your final thoughts on that point.

Laura Yeah I think that’s really interesting. One of the things I do in ‘Gallipoli’ is to get people to think about how soldiers were absolutely trapped. When they signed up we talked about how you would feel, how would it be if you refused to sign? If you said, “No I actually… This is not what I signed up for” and we often use the figure of Jack Dunn who fell asleep at his post as a stimulus for that conversation. He fell asleep at his post, he was actually sentenced to death which means, obviously, facing a firing squad of your fellow men, your fellow comrades, and we talk about how truly awful that was as a sentence. He actually got his sentence commuted because his commanding officer said well actually the man was… He wasn’t lazy, he was actually still recovering from pneumonia but it actually allows us to talk a little bit about how it would be if you actually did refuse to fight and of course you would face that same sentence and the idea that these men were actually… After having been signed up - and actually signing up because of all sorts of reasons, actually not really to do with wanting to go off and kill people, war comes up, you’re told it’s going to be an easy conflict, you’re told it’s going to finish soon and you’re told you’re going to get to travel and I think those are genuinely the real reasons that many men signed up - and actually then they find themselves in this horrific situation where it is rather kill or be killed. I think that’s how I talk about violence within that context of war, that it’s forced upon these men, they have no option, they don’t really have the option to say no I don’t want to do that because they will be killed themselves otherwise.

I think when students understand that, that actually it wasn’t a killing spree, these men weren’t signing up because they actually wanted to go

off and kill the enemy - well, I guess some of them may have done but I think in general that’s not accurate - and I think when you explain to them the context of them being… once they’ve signed up they are committed and they have no way out, no way of saying no, no way of escaping - then I think you view the violence in a different light. I think for me that’s how I get around that one.

Sally Well thank you for that because it’s not an easy question by any means.

Laura No it isn’t and I do really fully understand it but I think it’s contextualising that violence and helping students to understand that this was not a great place to be. As soon as you signed up and as soon as you landed it was hell on earth and yet you had no option but to follow orders. That probably helps to provide that context for the violence.

Sally Thank you very much, Laura, for sharing your expertise with us.

Laura Thank you, Sally, it’s been a pleasure.

Sally This episode of ‘Speak Up-Kōrerotia’ invited guests to ponder, based on their work and experience, the question: Does teaching about war simultaneously teach us about peace?

Katarina Standish’s answer was emphatic, she sees a fundamental disconnect between sanctioned commemoration of so-called legitimate violence and attempts to teach that illegitimate violence is unacceptable - because violence, after all, is still violence. Rowan Light and Laura Jones were not so clear-cut in their views, recognising the importance of remembering atrocity and learning from it. Laura emphasised the importance of teaching multiple narratives of war and of challenging people to think about narratives from different perspectives, while Rowan made the point that teaching war doesn’t automatically teach peace but that you might have to actually consciously think about that as a separate thing.

Whatever your personal views on the subject, these three guests have hopefully made you pause and reflect a bit on the reasons for commemoration, something which is certainly critical if commemoration is indeed to act as a reminder and deterrent against future conflict.

This is Sally Carlton with ‘Speak Up-Kōrerotia.’ Find us on Facebook and Twitter and our transcripts are available on the website of the Human Rights Commission and the Christchurch City Libraries.