My Account
Recently my partner Andrew helped my family uncover quite a bit of information about my father’s time in the Army in World War II, including insights from a diary kept while he was a prisoner of war after being captured on Crete. It has been eye opening.
Growing up, I remember Dad was a regular at his RSA in Palmerston North. My family heard little of his war experiences, and that seems to be common among men of his generation who leaned heavily on the RSA and former comrades for what we’d now call their mental health.
Men that the family had never met before turned up at my father’s funeral to pay their respects and lay poppies on the casket. It was like a second family, but one that he had kept entirely separate from us.
The RSA that he belonged to was one of the first established in NZ, formed in 1916. It went into receivership in 2012 and was re-launched in a new form in 2015, sharing clubrooms in a hotel. Its welfare service continues, through formation of a Trust, and there are regular club nights.
This is becoming an all too familiar scenario – increasingly, RSAs find themselves struggling to turn a profit as the servicemen and women who the organisation was formed to support grow older, their reduced mobility making it difficult to regularly eat and drink there. Other factors are at play too, and they are discussed in our front page story on our own RSA’s battle to stay financially afloat.
RSA staff spoken to by Hibiscus Matters are a very caring bunch of people who make veterans’ wellbeing their top priority. This gives me confidence that whatever happens to the site in Vipond Road that we now know as Hibiscus Coast Community RSA, the support and commemorative services that it provides, along with the special role it has within the community, will find a way to go forward.
