Home Front to Front Line

Location: Opus and Whakatāne Community Board Galleries – Te Koputu a te whanga a Toi – the Whakatāne Library and Exhibition Centre

The campaign that Commonwealth troops launched in Passchendaele, Belgium, on 12 October 1917 was supposed to be the answer to the years of utterly futile trench warfare that the First World War had become mired in. Instead it became the single most disastrous day in New Zealand’s military history.

Some 2,700 Kiwis became casualties, with 846 falling in less than four hours for the sum gain of 400 metres of enemy territory. The total number of British, Australian and New Zealand casualties claimed in the campaign was nearly 12,000, and most of them lie to this day in Tyne Cot Cemetery near the battlefield; 8,366 of the graves are unnamed.

Commemorating Passchendaele – Home Front to Front Line by Robyn Hughes aims to bring those young men back from anonymity. From excerpts of local bank clerk Monty Ingram’s frontline diary and newspaper entries recording the knitted contributions of New Zealand’s women – sent to brothers, fathers and husbands - Robyn’s work tracks her attempt to understand what happened at Passchendaele through personal stories from the frontline, published accounts of home front efforts, and her own experience as a contemporary reflection on the war a century later.

An extension of her previous exhibition, Cassino, at Te Kōputu a te whanga a Toi in 2014, Commemorating Passchendaele again presents an intense and impassioned visual exploration of a war that hit close to home and still has repercussions to this day.

Commemorating Passchendaele – Home Front to Frontline opens 4 pm on 16 September 2017 at Te Kōputu a te whanga a Toi – the Whakatāne Library and Exhibition Centre. The opening event will include a special presentation from Glyn Harper, Professor of War Studies at Massey University outlining what happened on the battlefields of 1917 and why their military plans went awry for the allies. If you would like to attend this opening event and special presentation, please join our mailing list, email museumandarts@whakatane.govt.nz or call 07 306 0505.

This exhibition is part of New Zealand's First World War Centenary | 2014–2019.

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