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by Santiago Bonhomme - writer and journalist

I arrived in New Zealand from Chile in the third week of March, several years ago. Before coming, I tried to understand this island, not only in practical terms, like how much one could earn per hour, but also in something that, for many, might seem less sexy, its history, its culture, its ways of thinking. I wanted to know where I was going to live, not just how. ANZAC already appeared as an inevitable date. But it was not my story.

And yet, experiencing it was something else. The country seemed to come to a halt. I remember the early morning light, the silence, the sense that something was happening without needing to be explained. It was not just another public holiday. There was a form of reflection that did not impose itself, it was simply there. At the time, it felt unfamiliar. I did not fully understand what was being remembered, but I knew it was not something light. At dawn, in a ceremony that returns each year, the country pauses for a minute of silence.

Over time, I began to understand what holds that day together, and how a shared memory takes shape. Not just a recollection, but something harder to name. A deep, quiet pain carried by thousands of families whose sons were taken from them and sent to die far away, very far away, in a war few ever truly understood.

But there is also something else, a form of quiet pride that coexists with that loss, a way of holding what happened without turning it into a closed narrative. This year, that frame felt different. And with it, an uncomfortable question, how do we remember ANZAC in a world at war?

Images circulate every day, constantly, across social media, in a flow that erases distance. What once belonged to history books now appears fragmented, immediate, often without context. War is no longer only the delusion of a handful of presidents. It is also the ease with which that delusion becomes possible, the way it takes hold and finds resonance.

It is in Europe. It is in the Middle East. And it is also in places barely seen, in Africa, in the horror of the civil war unfolding in Sudan for the past three years, where more than 160,000 people have died and 34 million urgently need humanitarian aid, in one of the worst catastrophes on the planet. A war that exists but does not always become visible.

ANZAC, then, in this context, no longer belongs only to the past. It becomes present. Not as repetition, but as a measure. Because just as 111 years ago New Zealand families were torn apart, the same is happening today to thousands of families, in other places, under other names.

It becomes inevitable to return to that uncomfortable question. How do we remember ANZAC in a world at war?

What did we do with that silence at dawn while war continues to unfold?