How Does New Zealand Portray War In 2026? And Why Does This Matter?

Tuesday, 24 March 2026, 5:44 pm
Opinion: Frances Palmer

‘War Birds over Wanaka’ at Easter is set to portray a new way to celebrate death and resurrection, while the Edinburgh Military Tattoo made its debut in Auckland in February, armies of numerous nations marching as before to stirring military music in immaculate uniforms, firing up passions with choreographed collaboration, military style, but reality check – such spectacles are not war.

Almost every family in NZ lost family who were soldiers in past wars, and agree their sacrifices must be respectfully remembered in our museums. However, some question that a museum’s role as a war memorial excludes others, including civilians. Do not all victims of war deserve to be remembered?

And isn’t resistance to war, a key part of NZ’s history, earning fame for its nuclear-free zone stand in a world threatened by catastrophic nuclear war, also important to commemorate and show the world?

The first objective of the 1996 Auckland Museum War Memorial [AWMM] Act is ‘the recording and presentation of the history and environment of the Auckland Region, New Zealand, the South Pacific and, in more general terms, the rest of the world’. Auckland Museum’s 2025 plan included ‘broadening our commemorative narrative to be inclusive of diverse experiences and events relevant to our communities’ and ‘exploring themes of conflict and peace’.

Action by the NZ government and New Zealand’s mainstream nuclear-free movement which peaked in the 1980s, were defining events in our history. But text and photos at Auckland Museum explaining official government opposition to nuclear testing on Mururoa have been removed. Forty years after the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland Harbour, and almost 40 years since New Zealand’s Nuclear Free Zone legislation, AM has yet to showcase the successful collaboration of multiple strands of civil society and govt, including Greenpeace’s active opposition to nuclear testing across the Pacific, which provided the context for Nuclear free zone legislation in NZ and the South Pacific.

The symbol of human trauma of nuclear war at Auckland Museum was for decades a life size photo of a Nagasaki mother and child installed by ret. Lt Col Pugsley, Historical Director of WW2 and post WW2 exhibits in 1996. Nearby, a letter by Dr Peter Eccles Smith on NZ’s civilian surgical team in Vietnam during the war, outlined a day in surgery. Both war trauma items were recently removed.

When the head of war exhibits was asked why, she told a NZ surgical team doctor that the photo was ‘too confronting’. And there’s now ‘no space’ for Dr Smith’s letter. That would also be ‘confronting’ amidst the array of US military uniforms and kit now occupying that wall in the ‘KIWIS IN ASIA’ room.

Why are peace advocates concerned about these trends? This year is seeing the greatest number of active armed conflicts since the end of WWII. The Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight on 27 January, the closest ever to midnight. International law is scoffed at by Trump’s US government and Israel. Funding for nuclear weapons programs is increasing. The New START treaty (nuclear arms reduction treaty between US and Russia) expired in January. Trump will not renew arms limitation agreements.

This year is 30 years since the International Court of Justice declared that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally contradict international law. 2027 will be the 40th anniversary of NZ’s nuclear-free legislation, a fitting time for our museums to launch exhibitions that include NZ’s official and civil society opposition to nuclear weapons, and tell the fuller story of NZ’s peace and war history.

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