Eight-year-old Maia Carran pressed the bugle to her lips at the Otautau ANZAC Day service on Saturday morning and did something no one in her family had managed before — she played the Last Post solo, and she did it younger than any Clapp before her.
The bugle in her hands is no ordinary instrument. It belonged to her great-great-grandfather James Clapp, who served aboard HMS Ajax in the First World War. He entered the Royal Navy as a cabin boy at around the age of 12 and played the bugle on the ship. The same instrument has passed down through the generations since then, carried most recently by Maia’s grandfather David Clapp, who has played it at every ANZAC Day for sixty years. He first performed at age 12, when he was believed to be the youngest person to have done so. This year, his granddaughter broke that record.
Before the service, Maia was honest about how she felt. “I’m a bit nervous this time because I’m going to be on my own and I only played with Poppa for one year,” she said. Last ANZAC Day she had stood beside her grandfather and played alongside him. This time, she stepped forward alone.
The moment she raised the bugle and sounded the Last Post across the crowd gathered in Otautau, a sixty-year tradition became something wider. Four generations of the same family have now carried that sound across the years — from a young sailor aboard a warship more than a century ago, to an eight-year-old in Southland who started learning the trumpet at age five and took up the bugle not long after.
Her grandfather, in the way of men of his generation, kept his praise measured. “She could make a noise, quite amazingly,” David Clapp said. Then, after a pause: “Anyway, she’s done that and she’s done very, very well.”
Her mother, Katie Carran, offered a different measure of her daughter’s musical gift. “Maia was able to read music before she was able to read books,” she said. Maia plays in the Takaka Citizens Band and has been learning formally for years, with she and her grandfather meeting to practise three times a week ahead of each ANZAC Day. The discipline behind a public performance at age eight is considerable, but when Maia was asked what the most meaningful part of the day was for her, she did not mention the history, the uniform, or the crowd. “The most important thing to me is I get to spend time with my Poppa,” she said.
That answer might be the most honest account of what ANZAC Day has always been, underneath the formality and the ceremony — a thread running between people across time, kept taut by repetition, by practice in kitchens and back yards, and by the simple wish not to let something be forgotten.
This year marks the 111th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915, where 2,770 New Zealanders died during an eight-month campaign that shaped how this country has understood itself ever since. The 2026 commemorations carry the theme of Pasifika, acknowledging the contribution of Pacific soldiers who served under the New Zealand and Allied flags across the conflicts of the twentieth century. Services were held from Invercargill to Kaitaia on Saturday morning, many of them at dawn despite the tail end of the stormy weather that had lashed the north a day earlier.
Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro, speaking at national commemorations, described the day’s enduring significance. “Anzac Day remains one of our most important civic occasions — a moment to honour the courage, sacrifice, and dedication shown by generations of New Zealanders in times of conflict,” she said.
In Otautau, a small town in inland Southland, the occasion carried its own particular weight on Saturday. It is the kind of place where the same families show up to the same service year after year, where the names on the memorial are not abstractions but ancestors. The bugle that James Clapp played on HMS Ajax has come home to that kind of community — and it found, in Maia, someone ready to carry it forward.
At the service’s close, after the Last Post had fallen silent and the minute of remembrance had passed, Maia played the reveille — the call that signals the return to life. For sixty years those two calls have belonged to David Clapp and the instrument he inherited. Now they belong to Maia too. She has broken one family record, and given the age at which she has started, she has a very long time to set another.
The full story was reported by RNZ, and the Otago Daily Times also covered the Clapp family’s ANZAC tradition.
Did you attend an ANZAC Day service this morning? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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