AT SAVAGE MEMORIAL

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 74, 29 March 1943, Page 2

AT SAVAGE MEMORIAL

ENSHRINED IN STONE

Dust ■ stirred again yesterday above the last resting place of Michael Joseph Savage, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and words of eloquence and hymns of beauty sounded anew. They extolled a man who was, and a brotherhood he symbolised ... a man whose works and ideals were now to be enshrined in stone, and garden, and pool, and beauty of flower and tree.

Men of the forces were there, though the moment was one of sunshine and peace and gratitude. There was another symbol. It was a man of peace and humility who rested below, a man whom circumstance had made a man of war.

So, as he was, is now his country. A land of peace and beauty and human fellowship; a land that is a pointer of social progress to the world. A land that, in defence of the ideals it represents, is now giving its whole strength and life to war. His Vision Our Cause It was hard to fit mat atmosphere of war into the scene of yesterday, as hard to fit as the tinkle of the Vespers bell amid the roar and tumult of anti-aircraft fire and bombs in a beleagured city. Yet the idea was the same. Because of the vision and humai-ity of such men as Michael Joseph Savage, and the Christianity he represented, this nation and all like nations have a cause for which to fight. A country spoke in praise through the voice of the leader of its Government; a political party tendered its tribute in stone and word — but there was no sectional feeling in the reverence which a concourse of people gave to the memory of a man who was loved and honoured by all. As he stood, amid the members of his Government, beside the tall white shaft that is the central feature of a beautiful stone monument, before he pulled the cords that released the draping flags from a symbolic figure of Justice and Humanity, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Mr. Fraser, spoke of this man, his predecessor in the leadership of the nation. . . . "This memorial and Garden of Remembrance, simple, dignified, beautiful, fitly portray and symbolise the simplicity, the dignity, the beauty and the beneficence of his life and life's work. No man ever loved the people more than Mr. Savage, and no man in the history of this Dominion was ever more widely and more sincerely loved by the mass of the people. . . . His Monument "The people whom he loved, whom he lived for, whom he worked for, and in whose service he died, need no formal material memorials of any kind to remember him by. He is enshrined in their hearts. His,monuments are on every hand and In every home. . . .". He spoke then of the legislation enacted under the leadership of the late Mr. Savage; of the wide ranging benefits of social security, of housing schemes, of better educational facilities —his "enduring memorials"— and of the motives that had guided his colleagues of the industrial and political Labour movement in buildJγ T for him a monument in stone, and his Government (representing the people) in dedicating to his remembrance a garden and a park of 16 acres surrounding it. "This slender shaft," ,he said, "pointing skywards, calling, as it were, our beloved country to aspire to still greater heights of achievement, with its simple, plain and comprehensive inscription: ' He loved his fellow-men.' . ... This is their sincere

tribute. . . . This Garden of Remembrance and the Memorial Park is the worthy and fitting tribute of the people of New Zealand. . . . Together, both form a noble, dignified, beautiful, inspiring, poetical and thoroughly appropriate memorial of one whose life was a living poem of love for humanity and service to his country." Memory's Picture As the sun poured down upon the headland of Bastion Point upon the crowd of people gathered there for the formal unveiling and dedication ceremony, and upon the glowing waters and glorious vistas of the harbour it overlooked, memory brought forward again that day, March 31, 1940, when, through the countryside and in the hearts of its people, echoed and re-echoed the solemn mournful strains of the "Dead March" ... when a funeral train pursued its sad course, a pilgrimage of sorrow. The Maoris, who loved Michael Joseph Savage, were there then, as on this day, to wave their symbolic twigs, "taua" for "tears," to chant their dirge, and to intone their litany of praise for a departed chieftain. Cabinet members, sorrowing at the severance of ties of comradeship and the loss of an inspiring leader—they were there again. And spreading out, until the headland was one mass of humanity, was a silent, thoughtful, regretful peopled Song and word, and tears, too, in the eyes of aged people, who had felt in him a true and sincere friend. All these were the same. The same headland jutted over the sea that knew now grimmer craft than the yachts that then fluttered their sails — the same headland that had known bitter warfare when the stepson of Taramokomoko, with 400 vengeful warriors, had come in the dawn of the years to lay waste the pa of his father, who had left him in babyhood to perish, as he thought, on the Beacon Rock they then called Kohimarama, "Gathering in the Moonlight." But now a handsome stone memorial lifted above the heads of the throng where before had been only the earthworks of a fort built in the days of 1880 when a Russian invasion was feared. Not yet was there green sward, merging, colourful trees, the brilliance of flowers against the white stone or reflected in the opal pool. Dust drifted again over the grave of Michael Joseph Savage — awaiting, with his spirit, the coming of peace.