Wellington Great War Exhibition Part 2

The Great Hall of the GWE ends in a hallway, leading on one way towards the cafe and shop, and on the other end towards the ANZ room.

After the hard focus on the western front, the hallway moves over to the New Zealand part of the ANZAC. Explaining which parts of the country raised what regiments, numbers and where they were shipped to. Colourised images of the mustering troops, the gear and so on.

Below the large green sign you enter the ANZ room, with maps and colour photographs of the landing in the Dardanelles. The photographs that were colourised by hand in endless hours of work are impressive sights.

As the room is large enough for bigger exhibits, there are a german Krupp howitzer and a british 4 1/2" Howitzer. But the most interesting part of the hall was only a few steps away.

I could get a glimpse of it between the pillars of the room. There it was, the enormous diorama with more than 5,000 miniatures. The scene shown is the capture of Chunuk Bair on August 8th 1915, when the Wellington Battalion captured the ridge line.

A very happy Dennis in front of a very large exhibit. The sheer size of that installation is so incredible.

If you want to know about the building process of this monster of a display, take a look at the Armchair General on the Anzac Diorama Blog.

The 5,000 miniatures in 54mm scale consist of roughly a dozend different sculpts that were mastered by the Alan and Michael Perry and casted in the UK and then delivered to 140 wargamers in New Zealand, taking care of the assembly and painting of the miniatures. It took around 2 weeks to just take care of the terrain basics, with a team of at least 6 people working on the project at the same time.

The surface was first laser scanned at the original location and digitalised. That information was used to to cut large blocks of styrofoam into shape. The whole thing was set up at Weta Workshop, where they added flock and foliage to the surface. Later it was split up and transported to the NZ Dominion Museum for assembly and final touches.

The miniatures were pinned or glued into place by hand, a slow process that took several weeks to finish, but used as much information from the battle as they could find, to make it as accurate as possible. Later the glass walls and lights were installed. Among those large fighting scenes, are a lot of small vignettes, showing wounded soldiers on the shoulders of others being carried away from the battle, officers commanding their soldiers and of course a cameo by Peter Jackson (unfortunately I wasn't able to spot it myself, as I was made aware of the cameo after my visit). Further cameos by people working on this project are included in the diorama, and an overview can be seen here around the end of the post.

Further information on the project can be found in Wargames Illustrated #334 / August 2015 (the issue is sold out, but can be access through their vault) or like mentioned above in the Anzac Diorama blog. I have been to a fair share of museums and exhibits, I've been a couple of times to Warhammer World and seen the large dioramas like the Battle on Terra and such, but this was an amazing experience.

I have seen the set up before, online, so I thought I had an imagination of what I would see, but being there and seeing it for myself was amazing. I am aware, that this for most people very far away and with the timeframe this being showed until November 2018, the availability is limited, but I hope that you could get an impression of this insanely huge detailed project with this article.

My respect to all fellow wargamers that contributed to this project, a truely impressive piece of work, that hopefully will find a proper home beyond 2018.

You can see part one of the coverage, from the Great Hall of GWE over here: Great War Exhibition Part 1.

Link: Great War Exhibition