Historian helps fills gaps and debunk myriad

As a military historian and researcher at the Navy Museum in Devonport, Michael Wynd has helped put a focus on New Zealand’s rich naval history.

These days, he’s also helping members of the wider community start their own inquiries into the roles family members played in the military.

In more than 15 years at the museum, Wynd has sought out stories of people and events from more than a century of New Zealand’s naval history, and worked with the organisation’s growing collection of information and artefacts.

His research has been in response to inquiries from the public, government agencies and the defence forces, and reflects a passion for filling some of the blank spaces in our military history.

Recently, Wynd decided he’d share some of his researching skills and knowledge with interested members of the public.

He’s begun a regular hourly stint on Sunday afternoons at the Devonport Library, and the response has confirmed his belief that people are interested to know more about the past military service of family members, or want to know how to start finding out.

“I had been looking for a way to become more connected and bring this work to the community. And I’m pleased there is a level of interest,” he says.

Wynd loves his job and feels lucky to be in a position to build on his academic background studying history to become a “passionate” First World War, military and naval historian.

Melville High School, he too became a public servant, working for the Customs Service, before stints in advertising at Radio Hauraki in Auckland and a job with a toy company.

But as a boy he’d dreamed about being a soldier. Though he was turned down for officer training as a young man, he was always interested in military history.

When he was 35 years old, he finally enrolled at Massey University’s Albany campus to begin studying history.

Over his seven years on the campus as an adult student, Wynd was active in student affairs and in his last full-time student year was president of the students association at Albany.

He chuckles to recall the military’s reason for declining his application years before. “They told me they’d turned me down because I was too independent. And yet now, here I am working very comfortably within the system.”

Aged 57, Wynd can look back at a career that may not have seemed likely in his highschool years.

He grew up in Hamilton, where his father was a salesman and his mother worked for The Department of Social Welfare. From

For his master’s thesis at Massey, Wynd had already started working on a little-discussed aspect of military history – demobilisation, and what happened to all the servicepeople from New Zealand who were in Europe after the Armistice in November 2018.