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#Indigenous #ANZAC #ThisIsOurDayToo #NZ #NgāiTahu
dimsie.bsky.social Danielle, Petty Hate Machine @dimsie.bsky.social · Apr 25
My usual Anzac Day post. George was Ngāi Tahu.
My great-grandfather, George "Sonny" Skerrett, Gallipoli survivor, interviewed for the occasion of his 100th birthday in 1992: "Ashore, it was frightful. Terrible.... The Turks applied for the armistice to bury the dead. I went out with four doctors, couldn't do much for them, just bandage them. There were 4000 Turks buried that day, I never saw anything like it in all my life. I cried all day, all afternoon, I couldn't stop. Six of my mates, we did everything together, swum and played tennis, they were all out there dead. I looked for them but never found them. Some of the bodies had been lying out there for over a month, and they just fell to pieces in the 100 degree heat.... We were shelled continuously, shrapnel shells falling on both sides. Why I never got hit I'll never know. I still remember the beach. There were a couple of thousand men lying there in all shapes and sizes and forms, all wounded and sick.... We could only treat a certain number of them. The badly wounded, they'd say, you go and find someone else to look after, and they just lay there and died.... I still think about Gallipoli quite a bit. It accomplished nothing.... War's terrible, everybody loses. The only ones who win are the people who make the bombs and shells and the bullets."
April 25, 2025 at 8:57 AM