2 Issue 53 – June 2015 – QUEEN MARGARET CALLING
From the Principal
This year on Anzac Day, New Zealand and Australia, commemorated the centennial of the
Gallipoli landings of 25 April 1915. Tomark this milestone, two outstanding exhibitions opened
in the capital: first, the Great War Exhibition at Pukeahu National War Memorial Park; the
second, at Te Papa, both using the acclaimed creativity of Weta Workshop to tell those
compelling, personal stories of ordinary New Zealanders facing extraordinary challenges.
O n Anzac Day,
I attended the
Wellington dawn
service at Pukeahu War
Memorial Park. There was
a large crowd and the mood
during the ceremony was
respectful and reflective. At
the end of the service, a cup
of tea and an Anzac biscuit
was served in the Arras
Tunnel, appropriately
decorated throughout with
crimson poppies. For those
Queen Margaret College
girls who have travelled
on exchange to Baudimont
School in Arras, Northern
France, the story of the New Zealand miners
sent to the Somme battlefield to establish a
network of tunnels is very familiar.
Like many Wellingtonians, I also watched
the sound and light show projected on the
National War Memorial with black and white
photographs of soldiers at Gallipoli and
scenes from military involvement in other wars, all linked together
with the evocative poppy symbol. Women’s stories in wartime were
also depicted with images of
nurses on the front or female
factory or farm labourers back
‘home’ carrying out ‘men’s
work’.
I thought of the College
established just four years after
the failed Gallipoli campaign,
its purpose being: to provide
for girls a sound intellectual and
moral education, to build up
strong Christian character on a
broad religious basis and thus to
produce the best kind of girlhood
and womanhood. All credit
must go to our Presbyterian
Founders who believed so
passionately in the worth
of girls’ education and had the courage to
establish our school in the aftermath of a war,
in straitened financial times. It also didn’t help
that a ‘flu pandemic, the deadliest in modern
history, swept around the globe at that time
killing an estimated 20 million people, over
8,000 of whom were Kiwis.
There is no doubt that both the First World War and the Second
World War which followed changed the role of women in a way that
All credit must go to our
Presbyterian Founders who
believed so passionately in the
worth of girls’ education