Consultant historian Associate Professor Salesa speaks at the opening of the Auckland War Memorial Museum's exhibition "Entangled Islands".
Friday 29 August 2014 marked the hundredth anniversary of New Zealand’s invasion of Samoa during World War I. Associate Professor Damon Salesa, Academic Head of the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland, has been a major contributor to the commemoration events.
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Britain asked New Zealand to seize the German colony of Samoa as a ‘great and urgent Imperial service’. The New Zealand force was nearly 1400 men strong, and met with little opposition; German Samoa had no soldiers or military hardware, and surrendered almost immediately. New Zealand ruled Samoa for the next 48 years.
On the exact anniversary of the arrival of the first New Zealand troops in Samoa, the Auckland War Memorial Museum held a service to “recognise the duty and sacrifice of those involved, and acknowledge the close personal and political connections between Sāmoa and New Zealand today”.
The Museum engaged the University’s Associate Professor Salesa as consultant historian for an exhibition entitled “Entangled Islands: Sāmoa, New Zealand and the First World War”. This is first of the Museum’s centennial exhibitions to commemorate the First World War, and the first to focus on this shared aspect of Sāmoan and New Zealand history.
In his opening night speech, Associate Professor Salesa set the scene, saying “This exhibition is not just an exhibition about an event; the invasion was a relatively short and largely non-violent one. The exhibition is about the meaning of the war, what it has meant to different peoples’ lives, and what it means for us. It is about this shared history, and it shares languages, and spaces.”
He reminded the audience that the intertwined histories of Sāmoa and New Zealand create “a living legacy” and asked rhetorically, “Is there any legacy quite as strong, today, one hundred years after the war? Imagine a New Zealand without nearly 150,000 Sāmoans… Imagine if, in 1939, a German Pacific Fleet was still sailing between China and Apia. Or imagine the Auckland Blues, or Auckland culture or the All Black backline or the Silver Ferns, or New Zealand music, or this museum, if it was not enriched by generations of Sāmoa, a shared history that has tied together Sāmoa and New Zealand for a hundred years…
“By the time New Zealand left Sāmoa, thousands of Sāmoans had made New Zealand—and especially Auckland—their home. New Zealand may have left Sāmoa; but Sāmoa did not leave New Zealand.”
Read more about the “Entangled Islands” exhibition.
Hear an interview with Associate Professor Salesa and other historians on Radio New Zealand.
