1904: Wallace Troopers Memorial

July 29, 2020

By AHNZ

The Wallace Troopers Memorial was unveiled down Palmerston Street, Riverton, on 3 May, 1904¹. These days The State usually commissions and pays for (with your stolen money) monuments and memorials but back then it was done privately.

Erecting the memorial signals that the Riverton people had moved beyond the warrior’s phase (Honour Culture) and into Dignity Culture. The active, physical acts of war and parade were over and it was time to cement those acts as ‘done’ and move on. New Zealand culture had had its fill of Honour Culture’s glory, it was time now for Dignity Culture’s preferred virtue: duty. It even says so on this monument. People are quite aware of what they’re going through…

“The path to duty was the way to glory”

Another, I don’t think accidental, sign that Riverton and New Zealand were now in a Dignity Culture is the following passage. These words seem incongruous but were placed right alongside the feature article about this monument being unveiled in the Otago Witness..

“Professor Karl Pearson, P.R.S., in his Huxley Memorial Lecture at the Anthropological Institute, after giving evidence to show that mental as well as physical qualities are inherited from parents, called attention to the present lack of intelligence in British professional and working men. He does not think the remedy is to be enough in foreign methods of instruction or in technical education. Intelligence must be bred, and we are ceasing, he thinks, to breed it as we did 50 or 100 years ago.”²

I think every tertiary student of statistics would be familiar with Karl Pearson, though not these findings of his! What’s interesting is that Person was thinking this way and that New Zealand re-published it. And, especially, that the above passage is in the thick of a feature article about the Wallace Troopers’ Memorial.

The new era of Dignity Culture folk were concerned with IQ, with selective partnering, with raising strong and intelligent young. These are typical concerns of DC people and here they were in the 1904 mainstream. They are also disparaging and displacing of the Honour Culture population that had held the initiative and influence over New Zealand to this point. The Honour Culture person is brave and energetic, cunning and tactical, but he is not marked for being intellectual³.

We witness with this memorial the dawn of what AHNZ calls Boy Scout Dignity Culture (1904-1907.)

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1 Ref. Western Star; Papers Past

2 Otago Witness; Papers Past

3 For example, these Concrete Culture men of 1906 failed a basic IQ test by igniting themselves; 1906: Nelson’s 1906 Darwin Awards

Ref. Riverton South African War memorial; NZ History.govt

Image ref. Memorial postcard; New Zealand Vintage Postcards, Facebook

Image ref. TROOPER MEMORIAL, RIVERTON, N.Z. POSTCARD; Trade Me (2018)

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