We woke to the roaring sound of a gale pounding against the
house! “Not to worry”, said KC, “it is just a bit of wind. Quite normal for a
summer day in Wellington .”
The family was off early, because KC had to take Alvi to the ophthalmologist,
and Tim had to prepare for the field work he is starting in a couple of days,
so Anna and I had the time to wash clothes and have breakfast before heading
for downtown. Our goal was to visit the First World War Museum, and then the Te
Papa New Zealand Museum.
The WW I Museum is a present from the Kiwi director of Lord
of the Rings and The Hobbit, Peter Jackson, so it is done with all the
mastercraft of a movie set. You enter through the winding streets of a French
town, where between the boulangerie and the charcuterie you learn about the
events that led to WW I. One interesting factoid is associated to the
assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke in Serbia that triggered the war: It turns out that the assassin and his band
of 5 bad guys botched the attempt, and the bomb they had thrown bounced off the
car and injured some minor characters. The assassin, badly shaken, went into a
pub to steady his nerves. In the meantime, the archduke was taken to a safe
place, but figured that the least he could do was to pay a visit to the people
who had been injured. So he gets in his car, and follows an escort car to the
hospital. But then the escort car takes a wrong turn and finds itself in a dead
end alley, with the car of the archduke and his wife stopping behind them. At
this moment the original assassin was stepping out of the pub, which happened
to be in that very ally, and he sees the archduke right in front of him; so he
pulls out his gun and neatly shoots both the archduke and his wife, thus
triggering a bloody conflict in which nearly a million soldiers from both sides
perished.
The flow of the museum takes you through the trenches, the
battlefields, the big guns, and even a full size tank rolling over a German
trench. It is magnificently done, with plenty of side displays and a good
collection of little known facts about the war.
Finally, the exhibition ends with a big display about the
battles of Gallipoli, in Turkey, where the Australian and New Zealand Army
Corps (ANZAC) was given the task to occupy the peninsula of Gallipoli to
control the shipping lane of the Dardanelles. The Kiwis and Aussies are very
proud of the impenetrable front they presented to the Ottoman
Empire from April to December 1915, scrabbling to the steep sides
of a valley while the Turkish soldiers attacked time and time again.
Unfortunately the slaughter was for naught, and after 8 months of hard fighting
the ANZAC forces had to beat a retreat and abandon the ground so ferociously
held. 87,000 Ottoman soldiers died in the conflict, as well as 44,000 Allied
soldiers, including 6,000 Aussies and 3,000 Kiwis.
Thoroughly depressed as to the brutality of WW I, Anna and I
faced the roaring gale once again, and worked our way to the Te Papa museum, of
which the Wellingtonians are rightfully proud. Like the other museums of the
city it is free (but parking anywhere near the museum is NZ$4 per hour), and
truly enormous. Six exhibition floors offer to the attention of the interested
visitor all aspects of New
Zealand ’s history. The displays are a bit
labyrinthic, but you get lots of cool information about the geologic history of
New Zealand ,
its animals and flora, the Maori culture, and the growth of the modern country
through colonization and immigration. There were also special exhibitions about
cinematography and animation, and about Gallipoli, but you had to pay for those
so I didn’t see them.
After a delicious dinner of artichoke and mushroom home-made
pizzas we sat down to see a Kiwi movie, “Boy”. It was funny but at the same
time heart-wrenching. It is the story of a Maori boy and his brother, who live
with their grandma and four other little cousins. Suddenly grandma has to go to
Wellington to a
funeral and leaves the whole gaggle of kids in the care of 12-year old Boy. Boy
is a dreamer, who expects his hero of a father to come back some day. Well, dad
comes back but is a gang banger and drunk, who drags his son into all sorts of
mischief and trouble. It is a poignant story because it seems the Maoris are a
long way toward getting out of the lowest economic rung of the country, suffer
chronic alcoholism and gang-related violence, and very often neglect or
mistreat their children. Similar fates to those of the first inhabitants in
other countries colonized by the Europeans!
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