It has been forty-six years since New Zealand experienced its worst-ever peacetime disaster, when an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight crashed into Mt Erebus in Antarctica, killing all 257 people on board.
Nearly half a century later, it has been announced that a national memorial to the disaster will finally be built, following the decision to locate it in Christchurch.
Dr Rowan Light is a historian and curator at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and a lecturer at the University of Auckland.
His research focuses on national memory, commemorations, and how societies remember major events and collective tragedies.
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