Memorial Project posting 3

This week I have been taking students on several walks around five different monuments close to school. It took much longer than I thought and thank goodness for double periods. The teenage gait is incredibly slow. We visited the William Wakefield memorial at the Basin Reserve, the National War Memorial, the Memorial to the prisoners from Parihaka, the Greek memorial which has a stone in it from the battle site of Thermopylae which students thought was pretty cool and the Haining St site where Joe Kum Jung was shot at the beginning of the 20th century. I had hoped to get to Queen Victoria but I had to be content with showing photos in class. It was a good mixture of memorials that remembered past injustice, great white men and women, a relationship between countries, heroes and an aspect of war.

I found myself doing a lot of talking at each spot when what I really wanted was to use the site as a space for discussion and deliberation. While at the Wakefield memorial, Keith Barton, the visiting US academic who is back in town for a week, found us and I asked him how might I extract historical thinking from a memorial. His first suggestion was to ask students what the places are evidence of. Memorials, as historical interpretations, tell us far more about the people who constructed them than the actual events or people that they portray.



I tried this after lunch with varying success - I'll need to pick Keith's brain some more I think. The statue of Victoria has some really nice panels on the side of it and one was of the signing of the treaty of Waitangi. What this panel is evidence of is that society at the beginning of the 20th century thought that the relationship between Maori and Europeans was completely unproblematic. Maori had ceded sovereignty and Queen Victoria had reigned benignly. This, of course seriously misrepresents history! It was interesting talking to students about this panel and the fact that it tells us almost nothing about the Treaty of Waitangi itself. If we want to know who signed it and why, who didn't sign it and why, what was promised and what wasn't and what the consequences of the Treaty were we would have to go to a different source.



Many students thought the Haining St plaque was a bit lame given the viciousness of that hate crime. One pointed out that a similar plaque in the Basin Reserve commemorating the record number of 6s hit in a cricket innings was quite a lot bigger. On Keith's advice, I asked them what it would tell a class in 100 years time about people today (the plaque is a very recent addition to the memorial landscape). That generated a bit of interesting discussion. I thought it might represent the move to apologize for past wrong doings. Whether that be for the treatment of aboriginies, Maori, Chinese, Samoans, slaves etc... What does that say about us today? Using history to contextualise the present is a really good thing to do but it is also probably the hardest. Both groups pointed out that on the plaque to Joe Kum Yung the "Absolutely Positively Wellington" logo appeared ironic given what was being remembered. One even pointed out that the logo was bigger than the name of the man killed. One perceptive comment was that might be due to contemporary commercialism.

After the trip all students received their 1.1 research assignment and now they are about to start researching a memorial. Several have rejected the 5 I suggested which is great - and some have started to develop some really good other ideas. This is a remarkably easy way to get students interested in New Zealand history and social history too. Over time it will be good to develop a resource bank of primary sources relating to the events/people remembered as well as stories of their construction. I am especially interested in the story behind the Parihaka memorial. It would be great to use this as a starting point to teach about Parihaka in the manner Richard Manning describes in his recent PhD "Place, Power and Pedagogy: A critical analysis of the status of te Atiawa histories of place in Port Nicholson Block secondary schools and the possible application of place-based education models". There is some pretty interesting stuff in this thesis which I will need to spend a lot more time on.

Long term I would like to have some year 11 students researching the historical context of a particular memorial and explaining the memorial in light of the times that it emerged from. There are definitely year 11s who can do this. What would also be a bit more complex would be to have students researching the story behind the construction of a particular memorial. There will be many memorials for which that hasn't been done and it would involve students engaging in some genuine primary research. Somewhere like Hypercities would be a great place for students to publish this kind of research.