Auckland War Memorial Museum has expressed regret for the way it has dealt with a family seeking to reclaim war medals held in its collection.
Museum director of collections David Reeves told Fair Go he couldn’t rule out returning the medals to the family but didn’t want to prejudge the outcome of a long-overdue consultation.
“We made an offer to the family to meet face-to-face with them and for various reasons that didn't happen, and we regret that,” Reeves said.
The family of Douglas Paterson had been seeking the meeting since 2019, after Labour MP Chris Hipkins took up their cause and urged the museum to make the family’s wishes “paramount” in any decision about the future of the medals.
Paterson was an RNZAF helicopter pilot attached to an Australian unit fighting in Vietnam in 1970, when he risked his life to save a platoon of Australian soldiers.
The citation is online and tells a of a helicopter pilot who faced a hail of bullets many times to ensure his Anzac comrades could escape with their lives from a fight where they were outgunned and in peril.
That won Paterson the Distinguished Flying Cross.
“It was given away to a man who came and harassed my mother at a very serious of time of stress for her,” says son Rosco Paterson.
His mother Margaret had been contacted soon after her husband died in 1980.
“He told me that he looks at the death notices in the Herald, then he gets on to the widows,” Margaret Paterson told Fair Go.
“He started wanting Doug's medals, ringing me, calling, really being a nuisance, telling me about them and how now they'll be safe.”
Fourty-two years later, speaking to Fair Go, medal collector Brent Mackrell disputes that.
“It was not pressure. It was always an open invitation.”
But there was a sense of purpose, Mackrell explains, to preserve history.
“We've lost a lot of our history where widows have just said nope that's it bang, and out it's been turfed."
Rosco says his mother was pressured, needing to find work to support her family and settle into a new home having just buried her husband.
Margaret could not recall signing them away at the time. A detailed search by Fair Go has found no written agreement.
In 1998, Rosco wanted to wear his father’s medals to a national remembrance parade for Vietnam veterans and their families, and only then discovered they were gone.
Mackrell insisted he would only hand them back for that parade if Margaret signed an agreement to return them straight after and concede they were his for the purposes of gifting on. Feeling powerless, she agreed.
The medals move on
Mackrell held the Paterson DFC and two others of Douglas’ medals until 2001, when he gifted them to the Auckland War Memorial Museum along with 1200 military decorations collected over the years.
The family was unaware of this for several years and the museum thought there was no problem with how the medals had been obtained.
In 2018 the museum considered a formal request for deaccession of the medals – the technical term for removing them from the collection.
It looked at the available records, but no-one spoke to the family until it was with the news the Museum’s Trust Board had declined their request.
Former RSA national president, Air Vice Marshal (ret) Robin Klitscher had served in Vietnam with Douglas Paterson. He wrote to the board but his strongly worded letter supporting the family didn’t change that decision.
The Paterson’s MP Chris Hipkins wrote another letter strongly urging the museum to reconsider and put the family's wishes first.
Museum chief executive David Gaimster then gave a written undertaking to Hipkins that he’d be happy to meet with the family.
Rosco sent a request to meet them soon after, but the Museum failed to make good on that offer.
David Reeves says the museum is renewing that offer and meet to discuss options with the family for the future of the Paterson DFC and other medals.
“These particular medals, particularly the Distinguished Flying Cross, are the only medals that the Museum has that pertains to Vietnam, so that limits our ability to tell that story to future generations,” Reeves said.
“It's an important part of our collections policy to bring to light those stories which perhaps didn't receive the recognition at the time that they ought to have.”
Asked if one of the options might be returning the medals, Reeves told Fair Go "I couldn't rule that out".
Rosco Paterson says the family is preparing to meet with the museum soon.
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