Goal To Locate 3600 Photos For Māori Battalion Website

Goal To Locate 3600 Photos For Māori Battalion Website

A website has set for itself the impressive task of locating a photo of every one of the 3600 soldiers of the 28th Māori Battalion.

“If the families of these soldiers assist us it will be the first New Zealand infantry battalion from the Second World War to boast a photo of every man who served,” says Monty Soutar who last month became the coordinator of the Māori Battalion website.

The website www.28maoribattalion.org.nz was developed on behalf of the 28th Māori Battalion Association by Manatū Taonga – the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in partnership with Te Puni Kōkiri. It is dedicated to the memory of the Māori Battalion, a voluntary unit that fought in the Second World War. “We want to promote the site as a portal to everything to do with the ‘Māori Battalion’,” said Soutar.

Soutar, who wrote a book on one of the Māori Battalion’s five companies, has joined other staff in Manatū Taonga – the Ministry for Culture and Heritage with the express purpose of growing the amount of material on the site, increasing its users, and in so doing, promoting the preservation of family memorabilia for the future. “When we were gathering information about C Company we managed to collect 900 individual photos of the men in the unit,” Soutar recalled. “It took 15 years. With the advances in technology where people can scan photos and send them direct to the website we hope to reach the 3600 target a lot faster.”

The website has seen steady traffic since July 2010 with an average 3000 unique visitors per month. Visitors to the site are viewing a high number of pages, which suggests they are looking round the site. Many users have contributed their own stories, memories and photographs, helping to build the site’s content.

Currently the website includes an historical overview of the Battalion at war and at home, an interactive map, contributed photos, stories and memories, resources for teachers and school students, and a selection of photographs, audio files (oral history, radio recordings and waiata) and videos. It also includes a nominal roll and individual soldier pages for all of its 3600 men.

Radio New Zealand Sound Archives – Ngā Taonga Kōrero has digitised its historical Māori Battalion-related recordings and these have been made available for the website. This presents an exciting new opportunity to place the spoken dialectical Māori of the 1940s on the site. These recordings will be of huge interest to those studying the language and fit well with the government’s Māori Language Strategy to support the growth of iwi dialects.

There are 44 veterans living today with an average age of 90. It is hoped to achieve the goal of 3600 photographs while there are still veterans around. Photos can be contributed via the website www.28maoribattalion.org.nz or sent to 28th Māori Battalion website, Manatū Taonga – the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, P O Box 5364, Wellington.

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