The Text on the Plaque
The Archibald Baxter Peace Garden: The National Memorial for Conscientious Objectors
This memorial commemorates the fate of conscientious objectors in New Zealand during two world wars. The principled defiance of the state by conscientious objectors to military conscription has, over the years, helped expand the rights and liberties of all New Zealanders.
The First World War
Following heavy losses at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, the government introduced conscription in 1916. Many men opposed to war refused to serve in the military. Of the 138,034 men called up, 614 appealed on conscience grounds. Most cases were dismissed and those 286 who continued to refuse to fight were sentenced to two years’ hard labour in prison, banned from working for the government post-war and denied their civil rights for ten years.
In March 1917, Archibald Baxter was arrested at his home in Brighton in coastal Otago and, with 13 other war resisters, was transported to Britain and from there to the front lines in France. Although he was starved, threatened, beaten and tortured to force him to don a British army uniform, he never gave in, steadfast in his belief that it was always wrong to kill. Bound to a pole, he suffered the brutal Field Punishment No. 1 many times; the sculpture opposite refers to his ordeal.
The Second World War
During the Second World War, conscription (introduced by the First Labour Government in 1940) was resisted by more than 3,000 New Zealanders. Before unsympathetic appeal boards – which believed resistance to the war was ‘a failure of citizenship’ – fewer than 600 objectors had their appeals allowed, although they were subject to strict probation. Those who continued to refuse military service, 803 men, were held in spartan internment camps for the duration of the war – a punishment unique to New Zealand, much harsher than in any other Allied country. Those who resisted in these camps were imprisoned, often in solitary confinement. There was no appeal.
Māori Resistance
Despite active efforts to recruit Māori for wartime service, many Māori in Taranaki and Tainui-Waikato, strongly encouraged by Kīngitanga leader Te Puea Hērangi, resisted the call to serve King and Country, remembering that the Crown had confiscated much of their land during the 1860s. The best-known instance of nonviolent resistance by Māori to government land-grabbing occurred at the village of Parihaka in Taranaki, culminating in an invasion by colonial military forces in November 1881. Many of the Parihaka ‘ploughmen’ were imprisoned in Dunedin between 1879 and 1881. The leaders of the Parihaka resistance, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi, were welcomed onto the Ōtākou marae in 1882.