Attendees at an Anzac Day service in New Zealand joined together to lift a car that was preventing the ceremony from starting, heartwarming footage shows.
The unusual incident happened at a dawn service in New Plymouth, on the southwest coast of the country’s North Island, on Thursday morning.
Graham Chard, president of the local RSA (New Zealand’s equivalent of our RSL), told Radio NZ the car in question, a silver 2009 Mitsubishi hatchback, had been parked in the “worst possible place”.
“It was right at the bottom of the steps, leading up to where the speakers are, right in the middle of where the wreath-layers come out to get their wreaths,” he said.
“It right in the centre of where the lights are positioned for the crosses and the flags, so people actually couldn’t get up onto the upper level to be able to conduct their part of the service.”
When officials’ attempts to find the car’s owner, and then efforts to get a tow truck proved fruitless, attendees at the ceremony resorted to more manual means.
About 15 people combined their efforts to lift the vehicle with their bare hands and deposit it a few metres to the sideand out of the way, shifting it a metre or so at time.
“Do we have any muscle men out there please? We need a few hands,” Mr Chard announced to the crowd over a loudspeaker.
“Come on, the more hands the better. Let’s go!”
The assembled crowd cheered and applauded when the job was done.
Footage of the moment the car was lifted got posted on Facebook by a local resident, Reuben Doyle, and shared with New Zealand media outlets.
“5am is a hard time on Anzac morning to try and find a tow truck and we needed to get it out of the way,” he explained later.
“We identified a couple of police who were preparing to march on the parade. We’ve got authority to be able to shift the car … and mobilised as many people as we needed to be able to pick the car up and move it far enough away.”
Mr Chard was of the opinion that the car could not have been parked in the inconvenient position by accident, as the area had been blocked off by cones overnight.
“It seems that somebody had decided that they were going to move the cone, park their car, so that when we turned up at 4.45am, there’s a car parked right in the middle of the parade,” he said.
“We’re lucky that we had thousands and thousands and thousands of people who were there for the dawn service, so people were quite prepared to stand up and help us out.”
He said he hoped the car’s owner would “be embarrassed”.
Mr Boyle, who shared the footage, told 1News many of the attendees thought it was “pretty funny”, with only a smattering of folks who felt the lift was a touch too “dangerous”.
“People seemed to think that it was good Anzac spirit,” he added.
Anzac controversy erupts in Australia
Back in Australia, a local councillor came under fire at an Anzac service in Coogee for wearing a pro-Palestinian keffiyeh as she laid a bouquet of flowers.
Rafaela Pandolfini, a Randwick councillor representing the Greens, was accused of politicising the event with her fashion choice.
“Disappointed to see that a Greens Randwick councillor couldn’t help herself and had to politicise the Coogee Dawn Service by wearing one of the keffiyehs worn by the radical protesters and terrorists,” the Australian Jewish Association wrote on Twitter.
The keffiyeh is a traditional headdress worn in parts of the Middle East. It has no association with terrorism.
One person replied to the comment saying: “What a disgrace.”
Another said: “No class.”
Ms Pandolfini said in an email on Thursday afternoon that she liked to attend the dawn service as “my grandfather served in WWII and died from war related health issues and trauma before I was able to meet him”.
“I wear a keffiyeh every day,” she said.
“I have found the televised killing and maiming of over 30,000 Palestinian people extraordinarily distressing. This keffiyeh has a poppy on it.”
The controversial incident came after Australian veterans blasted pro-Palestine protests planned around Melbourne for Anzac Day as “disrespectful”.