NZ Remembrance Army restores over 200,000 war graves in New Zealand

11 Sep 2024

In April this year we celebrated the NZ Remembrance Army (NZRA) and their efforts for restoring over 150,000 service graves in New Zealand. 

Since then, along with volunteers and community groups like the Student Volunteer Army, NZDF and Cadet Forces, the work has continued.  All up, an estimated 200,000 service graves around the country have now been located, cleaned and restored. 

“The last six years have been a hard, but immensely rewarding slog to get us to this point,” says Simon Strombom, Managing Director of the NZRA. 

“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. 

“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 Resene and AMP.” 

The NZRA are working hard in your community to raise the standard of service graves and memorials to be the same or higher than those overseas. Their vision is to have every service grave pristine, every service contribution remembered. They are as much for the New Zealanders of today and tomorrow, as we advocate for respecting those of the past. 

No one that served should face the indignity of an unreadable grave, forgotten by time. 

Resene has been proudly helping the NZ Remembrance Army by donating all the paint they need.   

You can help too - to support NZRA to continue their meaningful and devoted work, click here. 

Published: 11 Sep 2024