|
Victor Denton War Memorial is a heritage-listed memorial at Nobby Cemetery, Nobby, Queensland, Australia. It was built In 1915. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992. == History == The Victor Denton War Memorial at Nobby was erected in 1915 and was made by Bruce Brothers, monumental masons of Toowoomba. Funds for the memorial were raised by local residents of the district, making it an uncommon example of a public memorial erected in a cemetery. The memorial honours Private Victor Denton who was killed at the Dardanelles on 16 June 1915 and is the first known memorial of the First World War erected in Queensland.〔 The town of Nobby is located on the Darling Downs. The first white settlers arrived on the Downs in search of rich grazing land and by the 1840s, led by the Leslie brothers and John Campbell had established over twenty stations. These stations prospered until their expansion was curbed due to the pressures of selection legislation and land was resumed for agricultural use. The area, which had previously been a primary producer of wool, diversified into wheat and dairy farming. By the 1920s, wheat had become the primary crop with State experimental farms providing the area with superior varieties of wheat.〔 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.〔 There were many different types of memorials in Queensland, however the broken column was more commonly used as a funereal monument, symbolic of life cut short. When the erection of memorials became prolific in Queensland, it was unusual for them to be located in graveyards, as this one is. They were more likely to be erected in more publicly accessible places such as gardens or intersections.〔 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「Victor Denton War Memorial」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|