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Gympie and Widgee War Memorial Gates is a heritage-listed memorial at Mary Street, Gympie, Gympie Region, Queensland, Australia. The gates provide an entranceway on Mary Street (the main street of Gympie) through to the Gympie Memorial Park in Reef Street. The gates were designed by George Rae and built in 1920 by A L Petrie & Son. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992. == History == The Gympie War Memorial Gates were unveiled in 1920 by Edward, Prince of Wales. The gates were designed by George Rae, of Brisbane. Monumental masonry firm A L Petrie and Son of Toowong undertook the stonework whilst an unknown local blacksmith produced the ironwork. The memorial honours the 167 local men who fell in the First World War and the two who fell in the Boer War.〔 The township of Gympie was established after the discovery of gold by James Nash in 1867. This was the beginning of the first large goldrush in Queensland, and the town developed to support and supply the prospectors who came to the area.〔 In 1919 the Queensland Institute of Architects held a design competition for a memorial on behalf of the Gympie and Widgee District Soldiers' Memorial Fund. George Rae, then a young draftsman in the Brisbane office of Lange Powell won the competition. He also won the competition for the design of the Toowong War Memorial in Brisbane.〔 George Rae was born in Glasgow, Scotland and arrived in Brisbane in 1914. Between 1919 and 1922, he was articled to architect L L Powell. He left to travel to Sydney and worked as a draftsman in various offices until 1924. Whilst in Sydney, he studied at Sydney Technical College and also with Professor Leslie Wilkinson. Returning to Brisbane in 1924, he again worked with L L Powell, firstly as chief draftsman and then as an associate. He became a registered architect in Queensland in 1929.〔 The masons, A L Petrie and Son were the largest monumental masonry firm in Queensland at this time and were responsible for many First World War memorials throughout the state.〔 The Henderson family donated their Union saw mill site for the Gympie Memorial Park and additional land was acquired at a later date.〔 One of the objections was that the memorial park site was not on Mary Street, the main street of Gympie, but on the street behind it, Reef Street. So the Hendersons also donated land with a 31 ft (9.45m) frontage from Mary Street through to Reef Street to create a passageway to the memorial park. The memorial gates stand on Mary Street at the entrance to the passageway. The cost for the gates was £800 and although the memorial was for the whole of the Widgee Shire, the funds were raised primarily by public subscription and the Gympie City Council.〔 Australia, and Queensland in particular, had few civic monuments before the First World War. The memorials erected in its wake became our first national monuments, recording the devastating impact of the war on a young nation. Australia lost 60 000 from a population of about 4 million, representing one in five of those who served. No previous or subsequent war has made such an impact on the nation.〔 Even before the end of the war, memorials became a spontaneous and highly visible expression of national grief. To those who erected them, they were as sacred as grave sites, substitute graves for the Australians whose bodies lay in battlefield cemeteries in Europe and the Middle East. British policy decreed that the Empire war dead were to be buried where they fell. The word "cenotaph", commonly applied to war memorials at the time, literally means "empty tomb".〔 Australian war memorials are distinctive in that they commemorate not only the dead. Australians were proud that their first great national army, unlike other belligerent armies, was composed entirely of volunteers, men worthy of honour whether or not they made the supreme sacrifice. Many memorials honour all who served from a locality, not just the dead, providing valuable evidence of community involvement in the war. Such evidence is not readily obtainable from military records, or from state or national listings, where names are categorised alphabetically or by military unit.〔 Australian war memorials are also valuable evidence of imperial and national loyalties, at the time, not seen as conflicting; the skills of local stonemasons, metalworkers and architects; and of popular taste. In Queensland, the soldier statue was the popular choice of memorial, whereas the obelisk predominated in the southern states, possibly a reflection of Queensland's larger working-class population and a lesser involvement of architects.〔 Many of the First World War monuments have been updated to record local involvement in later conflicts, and some have fallen victim to unsympathetic re-location and repair.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gympie and Widgee War Memorial Gates」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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