Only the Dead: The Construction of Memory and Myth in New Zealand’s Lost Battles of the Mediterranean

This thesis examines official, personal, fictional, and biographical accounts of New Zealand military participation in Greece and Italy in World War Two, considering how they attempt to make sense of traumatic wartime experiences, and how personalities and events have been mythologised in ways that have implications for individual and societal perceptions of culpability, heroism, and national identity. The scrutiny of the works selected is contextualised by the precedent made in antiquity by Homer’s Odyssey, a primary text resonating with many subsequent narratives of a hero’s journey home from war, and is critically informed by theories of trauma, memory, and narrative, as well as by general theoretically oriented studies of the literature and language of war. The literary construction of history is examined in Dan Davin’s Crete, a work in which he faced the particular problems of writing history that was both official and contemporary. An examination of Report on Experience focuses on the manifestations of debilitating trauma and guilt in John Mulgan’s account of service with the Special Operations Executive in occupied Greece. A close reading of Patricia Grace’s Tu considers her delivery of the complexity of the Māori wartime experience, in critical alignment with the official record of the 28th Māori battalion. Finally, a consideration of Vasili: The Lion of Crete, Murray Elliott’s biography of Dudley Perkins, explores the difficulty of constructing a legend, and the issue of authorial dependence on the tropes of heroic literary tradition. The creative component of this thesis is part of a novel, in which a young New Zealander visits Crete in the 1960s, is confronted with the dark realities of a war and occupation still current in the consciousness of the island’s occupants, and must negotiate changing landscapes of truth and memory, honour and complicity, to find her own narrative of return and reconciliation.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• O'Connor, Rachel Margaret

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Calder, Alex
• Morris, Paula

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/67464

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/67464