Culture ministry axes Gallipoli site

2026-03-15 - 16:06

Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage is dumping the Ngā Tapuwae Heritage Trails website for Gallipoli and the Western Front. These are the driving and walking trails commissioned in 2014-2015 to enable New Zealanders to retrace the New Zealand experience on Gallipoli and the Western Front in France and Belgium, and the key training camps and hospital sites used by New Zealand in the United Kingdom. Since then, they have been used by thousands retracing their forbears’ steps in the First World War. Culture and Heritage acknowledge that the content still holds value, but they have made the decision to decommission this website from April 2026 as “a strategic decision to streamline our online offerings to account for resourcing changes, while keeping content accessible where possible.” It is intended that this will be taken down presumably in the week after Anzac Day on April 25. This “strategic decision ... to account for resourcing changes” is bureaucrat-speak for “We’ve sacked all our historians so let’s dump this.” Perhaps ongoing website rental cost was a factor. But that’s peanuts compared to the $2.4m and two years it took to create the website and apps that tie together the network of distinctive Ngā Tapuwae signs and museum installations throughout Europe and Turkey. I estimate that the ongoing website rental costs are perhaps up to $2000 a year at most. If Culture and Heritage is so strapped for cash, I am happy as a concerned New Zealander to pay that fee to keep it going. However, I suspect that simply getting rid of it was the driving force. I took my family of nine to Gallipoli for eight days in September last year. I have been many times, but I was last there, pre-Covid, in 2019. I wanted to go again to see the impact of the July 2024 fires and assess what one could see now that the seaward slopes leading to the heights of Chunuk Bair were burnt clear in the blaze. It was amazing seeing the landscape now as open as it was in 1915 and being able to clearly identify the outline of the trenches. I spoke with the director of the Gallipoli National Heritage Park who assured me that it was the intention not to let the trees grow back. What also stood out for me was how much the Turkish signage has improved, giving much more detail for each location identifying Turkish personalities within battalions and showing aerial photos of the ground showing both Turkish and Anzac trenches. I noted that in some locations such as Quinn’s Post the signage had clearly been influenced by detail given in the Ngā Tapuwae trails. That is not surprising as the two Turkish historians who drafted the text of these signs, also worked with us on developing the trails. I met with many of the tour company managers and guides based in Eceabat and Canakkale, many are old friends who I have known in some cases for 20-30 years. They are contracted to run the popular same day Anzac tours that do an early morning pickup from Istanbul, provide lunch and then give a four-hour potted tour of the Anzac area, before returning to Istanbul: thousands of tourists make this journey each year. All the guides spoke of the importance of the Ngā Tapuwae Gallipoli trails website in assisting them in answering specific questions and pointing out spots en route in response to queries from New Zealand travellers. They said it was a pity that the apps no longer appeared on Google or Apple, but they saw it as important that the website was still operating. The same is true for the Western Front trails. My first detailed visit to the battlefields of France and Flanders was during my year at the British Army Staff College at Camberley in 1980. We had our obligatory VW Devon-conversion combi camper with a kiwi sticker on the back. At Messines the museum was shut but after walking the ground, we found a note on the back from the deputy mayor asking us to call in. He opened the museum for us. I grew to appreciate that at Longueval on the Somme, at Arras with the New Zealand Tunnelling Company, at Ypres and in Le Quesnoy: it was the local community who told our story and honoured New Zealand’s participation in this war. Instituting the Ngā Tapuwae trails was New Zealand playing catch-up and, in a sense, thanking them for the job they continued to do. It is humbling to visit the New Zealand battle sites and discover how much we feature in the story they were already telling. My last visit to the Western Front was to attend the opening of the exhibitions at Le Quesnoy in 2023. Our story is as important to the local community in Le Quesnoy and the surrounding villages as it is to us. As they say, this was a British sector in the advance of 1918 and one not told in the French history books because the French forces were not there. Local support was a critical factor in gaining such a superb site for the New Zealand Museum in the town, our stories leading to Le Quesnoy are told in the Ngā Tapuwae Western Front trails. The ignorance and boorishness of Culture and Heritage’s decision spits in the faces of these communities where our dead lie. I find it hard to believe that when the Te Papa Gallipoli the Scale of Our War exhibition has received over five million visitors, educating generations of young New Zealanders on the Gallipoli Campaign, we decommission the website specially made to allow them to walk our battlefields of both Gallipoli and the Western Front. One wonders if Culture and Heritage consulted the New Zealand ambassadors in Paris, Brussels and Ankara before taking this step. We have the distinctive signposts at key locations in France and Belgium that tell our story linked by a website that will soon be no more. I guess the ministry has no thought of maintaining these now that the website is closed. Will they be taken down as has been the case with the Ngā Tapuwae sign that stood on the Wellington Wharf describing the departure of the Main Body of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the First World War. I understand that the Governor-General or Winston Peters may speak at Gallipoli this Anzac Day. I suspect they do not know that the website used by many of the New Zealanders in the audience to get there and understand our story is being archived the following week. Nor will the eminent New Zealanders giving addresses at the Hyde Park Dawn Service or in St Paul’s Cathedral later in the Day, or at the New Zealand Memorials at Messines, Gravenstafel, Longueval, Polygon Wood, at Le Carrière Wellington in Arras, the Menin Gate or those who walk to my favourite site at Ramparts Cemetery with its graves of the Māori Pioneer Battalion next to the Lille Gate at Ypres. Many of the New Zealanders in attendance will have used the trails website to walk the path of family members who fought there, unaware that a week later it will be gone. I remember a previous minister of culture and heritage spending a day recording part of the narrative for the Western Front, and I know that the present minister lists historian as one of his occupations. I wonder if he was consulted. The notification of the decommissioning ended with the words. “We are so glad that the work that went into building Ngā Tapuwae Heritage Trails has created such an enduring legacy.” A legacy that has been praised by all, that the policymakers at the ministry are dumping for its $2000 annual cost, but why am I surprised? This is the ministry that spent millions restoring the Pukeahu War Memorial Carillon and then sacked the carillonist, sacked the education staff who ran the history tours at the Pukeahu War Memorial, sacked most of the historians in the ministry and now classes an “enduring legacy” as something that endures for just over 10 years and is dumped the week after Anzac Day. Our story deserves more than this. I share the view that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon expressed when he spoke at the Chunuk Bair service on Gallipoli last Anzac Day: “There are few battlegrounds as ingrained in New Zealand’s history and identity as this place. The very name ‘Chunuk Bair’, like the name, ‘Gallipoli’ resonates with New Zealanders at home, so very, very far away. The thousands of our men who spilled blood on this soil mean a part of our country is forever part of this land, too ... Many New Zealanders come to this place to honour our fallen. We show by our presence that we have made good on our promise: 110 years on, we do remember them.” Has he been told the Ngā Tapuwae website is being dumped? The New Zealand Western Front trail signpost (with its distinctive Ngā Tapuwae Fernleaf logo of marching soldiers) at Longueval on the Somme looking towards Flers and the area taken by the New Zealanders in the First Battle of the Somme in 23 days of fighting from September 15, 1916. Photograph: Chris Hay Locales.