Friend or foe?

An ambiguous war memorial on the banks of the Waikato River raises confronting questions about what it is commemorating.

- PETER BALE

AImost every New Zealand town has one and some have several, reflecting a historical readiness for us to get involved in other people's conflicts: the war memorial.

This is a story about a war memorial in a small historic town, these days a pit stop on State Highway 1, an hour's drive south of Auckland. It is a memorial that, with its twin further upriver, might be the most ambiguous and history-laden in Aotearoa.

The Mercer war memorial embodies the Land Wars - once known as the "Māori Wars" and now called the New Zealand Wars by modern historians, fully aware of how one-sided they were. Yet it is dedicated to memorialising those who served and died in World War I, the Great War that came four decades later.

Towns and cities around the country have sometimes beautiful, often ugly, frequently workmanlike and even arguably inappropriate commemorations of the New Zealand Wars, the South African (Boer) War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam. We have, or had, streets named after Lord Kitchener, battles in the Crimean War - Inkerman, Balaclava - and Pākehā soldiers including Cameron and Von Tempsky (although Von Tempsky St in Hamilton was changed to Putikitiki St two years ago).

"[These memorials] were simply part of the accepted fabric of New Zealand life," historian Jock Phillips writes in To the Memory, a survey of the idea and execution of New Zealand war memorials. "Every town or village had one, and we passed by the simple obelisks in town centres or the soldier statues in municipal parks without stopping to examine them. They were part of our world, like football fields or lampposts or supermarkets." Mercer's is a particularly odd-even slightly spooky-memorial, laden with history. It is built from what was once an advanced weapon of a superpower.