ABSTRACT
Gallipoli: The Scale of our War opened at the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington in 2014 to mark the centenary of the First World War. A unique meeting of museum and creative industries, the exhibition reflected a broader current of change in New Zealand’s national memory of Gallipoli and the way this collective memory has been shaped or constructed by cultural products such as films and plays since the early 1980s. This article interrogates the function and formation of national memory by exploring a ‘genealogy of memory’ that places Te Papa’s Gallipoli in a historical sequence of the works that have contributed to the construction of a nationalist historiography of the Gallipoli campaign now on display at the National Museum. In exploring this history, this chapter understands remembrance in a wider ‘ecosystem’ of memory: that is, the deliberate and intentional ‘work of memory’ by groups, individuals, institutions, texts, and their audiences, that make ‘national memory’ possible and give it a sense of permanence. In these genealogies of remembrance, the contours of New Zealand’s First World War centenary were less about the war of 1914–18 and more about the contemporary needs of communities and the dedicated political and cultural agendas of specific groups.
