*Intro Memorial Way

Memorial Way will be a regular posting on the FFFAIF website featuring Memorials of the Great War from around Australia.

Soldier Memorials started to appear on the Australian landscape soon after the Boer War (1899-1902), to commemorate those men who had joined the soldiers of the queen to protect the British Empire’s interests in South Africa. These were at first used to honour the soldiers who were serving in the AIF during the Great War.

Photo: Boer War Memorial at Lismore, NSW, features a copper statue of New South Wales Lancer, made by the Sydney firm Wunderlich Ltd. [Munro Collection]

Ken Inglis in his book Sacred Places War Memorials in the Australian Landscape states that “from mid-1915 ‘patriotic’ ceremonies were organised throughout Australia” and that “memorials were ritually necessary and that honour boards and embellishments to older structures were not enough, moved people in many places to put up monuments giving public honour to men from the locality.”

Possibly the earliest memorial to the men of the First AIF was erected in Balmain, Sydney – a year after the landing of Anzac troops at Gallipoli. Many other localities followed suit. Inglis goes on to say “Memorials would have been still more numerous in Australia had the federal government not controlled their construction. From October 1916 a regulation under the War Precautions Act prohibited appeals unauthorised by state War Councils for any monument or memorial costing more than £25.”

Why not spend some time exploring Australia’s Memorial Way?

Memorial Way No.1 features The Cooks Hill Memorial at Bar Beach Newcastle (NSW)  and is contributed by FFFAIF member Ray Hudson.

Memorial Way No.2 is scheduled for next Web-Wednesday

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The Families and Friends of the First AIF thanks the Australian, UK and French governments for affording Australian and British soldiers – presently buried in mass graves at Pheasant Wood – dignified individual reburials in a new CWGC cemetery at Fromelles, and applauds Minister Snowdon and his British counterpart, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence and Minister for Veterans, Kevan Jones MP, for their joint decision to DNA test the remains at exhumation and use every reasonable method to attempt identification of each soldier.

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 FFFAIF supports the inscription of “FROMELLES” on National and State Memorials