An estimated 200,000 service graves around the country have now been located, cleaned, and restored by volunteers of the New Zealand Remembrance Army (NZRA), says Simon Strombom, Managing Director of the NZRA.

“The last six years have been a hard, but immensely rewarding slog to get us to this point,” says Simon.

“We estimate there’s over 350,000 service graves in New Zealand spanning every conflict from the New Zealand Wars, through to Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, and more recently Afghanistan.”

“But it’s not just service headstones – the NZRA is also finding and caring for family memorials that name a service person who never made it home and is buried overseas.”

“In 250 cemeteries around New Zealand, we are winding back the clock on decades of neglect, bureaucracy, vandalism, and nature taking its toll on the final resting places of service people and erasing our nation’s military heritage.”

“The NZRA now has to be one of the largest, volunteer remembrance projects of its kind in New Zealand – if not the world, which is something we are immensely proud of,” says Simon.

By far the biggest challenge to reaching he first 200,000 has been finding financial support to back the project.

“As a charity, it is very hard to get funding, we run the NZRA on the smell of an oily rag, with any public donations going directly back into restorations.

“Despite that hurdle we have reached this milestone, thanks to the volunteers who are freely giving up their time to work in their local cemeteries.

“The milestone has also only been made possible with sponsorship and products from some great organisations, including AMP, Bunnings, Resene, Bio Shield and Topfilte.”

“As we head into the warmer months, the NZRA is excited to be working towards the next 150,000 service graves and establishing a regular maintenance and mapping programme for the project going into the future,” Simon said.

Notes:

Across New Zealand, our people are working together to honour the sacrifice of those who served by returning dignity to their graves and ensuring their service is remembered.

We are working hard in your community to raise the standard of service graves and memorials to be the same or higher than those overseas. Our vision is to have every service grave pristine, every service contribution remembered.

We are as much for the New Zealanders of today and tomorrow, as we advocate for respecting those of the past.

We are on a mission to locate, restore, research, record, and share the graves and stories of those who served. Because no one that served should face the indignity of an unreadable grave, forgotten by time.

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