Saturday, 3 May 2025
High Cross Park, Randwick
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC, Governor of New South Wales

I too acknowledge the Bidjigal, Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gather, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and future. I pay my respects also to the many First Nations people who have served with such distinction in our Defence Force and continue to do so today.

Thank you, Aunty Maxine^[1] for you warm Welcome to Country, a vital, embracing part of today’s rededication.

Member for Coogee^[2], Mayor^[3], Lieutenant General^[4], members of our defence Force past and present, distinguished guests, friends, family all,

Randwick holds a special and poignant place in the story of Australia’s involvement in the First World War.

Just down the hill from here, at the Randwick and Kensington Racecourses—the latter now the site of the University of NSW^[5]—young men from all over NSW came to be billeted and trained in preparation for service overseas.^[6]

So many answered the call that in the early days, they had not even tents to sleep in.

As a newspaper article described, of a scene at Randwick Racecourse on a chilly morning two weeks after Australia entered the war:

[T]he air was sharp with frost, and […] as the light improved many strange objects were noticeable on the seats of the grand and Leger stands. It transpired that these were the forms of sleeping soldiers. Some 2000 recruits […] [had taken up] quarters in the two enclosures on the previous day, and used the stands for two immense bedrooms.^[7]

They honed their skills on the rifle ranges at the Randwick Army Barracks—now part of the Randwick Environment Park—and the mobilisation camp in Malabar.^[8] They practised, amongst other things, in the open spaces of Moore and Centennial Parks digging trenches, building radio towers and pontoon bridges in Centennial Park.^[9]

It was from these training camps, down Randwick Road—renamed ANZAC Parade in their honour in 1917^[10]—that many would march on their way to Circular Quay to embark for service overseas.^[11]

More than 330,000 served in distant lands during the First World War,^[12] in theatres stretching from Western Europe to the Dardanelles, to Egypt and Palestine, and down to what we now call Papua New Guinea^[13] and its surrounding islands to our north.^[14]

Of those young Australians who left our shores, more than 61,000 would not return.^[15] Many more^[16] were injured, returning to hospitals like Fourth Australian Repatriation Hospital, established across the road from here in 1915 and later to become the Prince of Wales Hospital.^[17]

Australian casualties during the First World War, in proportion to the number of troops contributed, were among the highest of all the countries involved.^[18]  It is said that every second Australian family suffered the loss of a father or son; a husband or brother; an uncle, a cousin, or friend.^[19]

Of those lost, only one was brought home during the war for burial.^[20]

Without a body, a funeral, a grave, at best only a letter bearing the news every family hoped not to receive, a deep-seated human need for new rituals of mourning and memorialisation was an imperative for grieving families. It was a need answered, in part, by the erection of thousands of public war memorials across Australia, almost all at the instigation of, and paid for, by local communities.^[21]

In stone and brick, granite and marble, these monuments served as a place around which our most sincere ceremonial expressions of national pride, identity, and remembrance evolved, sites of both private grief and public commemoration.

They also acted as honour rolls, listing the names of locals who had served, rather than just those who had fallen, a tradition that is common in Australia but less so, in other parts of the world.^[22]

Ken Inglis, Australia’s eminent authority on war memorials, attributes this particularly Australian tradition to our nation being one of the very few countries contributing all-volunteer armies.^[23] As he saw it, they were a collective and public acknowledgement of the act of volunteering itself; of the sacrifice that such service for the good of community entailed; and recognition of the cost of war on individuals, families, and the communities they came from.

Proposals for a memorial here in Randwick began even before the close of the war,^[24] and a committee formed to raise funds in 1919.^[25]

Stymied perhaps by the difficulties of raising money during the Spanish flu pandemic^[26], it was not until late 1924 that it was announced enough had been raised to, and I quote,

erect a cenotaph in the reserve at the intersection of Belmore Road and Avoca Street […] [to be] constructed in fine axed Tarana red granite”^[27].

On Anzac Day of the following year, ten years after the landing at Gallipoli, a ceremony was held before the newly completed monument here in High Cross Park, attended by “several thousand people.”^[28] Wreaths were laid, completely covering its base, and a “parchment scroll […] in a sealed tube”^[29] listed the 4,000 men from the Municipality of Randwick^[30] who’d served in the Great War placed inside by the Mayor, Alderman J. A. Bardon.

8 days later, and a hundred days ago today, the memorial was officially unveiled by the Governor General, Lord Forster^[31], at another ceremony, again attended by crowds, including recuperating soldiers from the repatriation hospital, given front row seats.^[32]

In the century since, countless more ceremonies have been held at this Memorial, the focus moving beyond honouring those 4,000 names on the parchment role to include all who have served and sacrificed in Australia’s wars, as well those who have served, and continue to serve, in times of peace.

Like the thousands of memorials that dot our towns and cities, it has become, and may it remain, a site of active remembrance. This memorial is more than reminder. It is a place where we pledge not to forget the sacrifices made by the fallen and those who have served, nor the values embodied by them, nor the freedoms they secured, nor the horrors from which those freedoms were wrought.

Through the rituals we enact today—the laying of wreaths, the recitation of the Ode, the playing of the Last Post, the holding silent in reflection—that pledge is sustained.

And so, as was the case 100 years ago when this monument was unveiled, in the years between, and in the years to come, we make that pledge again.

We will remember them.

[1] Aunty Maxine Ryan, La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council

[2] Dr Marjorie O’Neill MP, Parliamentary Secretary for Transport and Member for Coogee, Parliament of NSW

[3] Cr Dylan Parker, Mayor of Randwick City Council

[4] Lieutenant General Kenneth Gillespie AC DSC CSM (Retd)

[5] Memorialised by the plaque at the Anzac Parade entrance to the University, which reads “The battalions forming the First infantry Brigade of the Australian Imperial Force camped and trained on this site prior to embarking overseas on the 18^th October 1914”.

[6] Initial encampments for new recruits also included Rosebery Racecourse, and the Showgrounds at Moore Park: ‘The Centennial Parklands and the Great War’, New South Wales War Memorial Register website, available here

[7] ‘Recruits at Randwick’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1914, p.12, available here

[8] Sue Rosen and Associates, ANZAC Parade Heritage Assessment, 2022, available here, pp.44-45.

[9] ibid, pp.68-69, 85-86, 90.

[10] The renaming followed Randwick Road being widened and beautified with a flower bed running down the centre by Sydney City Council, and officially opened with the dedication of the Anzac Parade Obelisk, which used to stand at the Parade’s northern end, on 15 March 1917. The Obelisk, often called the ‘Digger’s Own’ on account of it being a gathering place for returned soldiers on Anzac Day to reconnect with old comrades, was moved several times subsequently due to road expansions. It now stands in the parklands near the corner of Anzac Parade and Moore Park Road. See, for instance: ‘Anzac Parade: The Forgotten Story’, Daughters of ANZAC website, available here

[11] This included the celebrated march of members of Australia’s first deployment of the war, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force, on 18 August 1914, in which “tens of thousands” lined the streets to farewell them: ‘Our Troops March through the City’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1914, p.12, available here

[12] ‘Overview of Australia’s Involvement in the First World War’, Department of Veterans’ Affairs website, available here

[13] At the time divided into the Territory of Papua and German New Guinea: ‘Where Australians Served During World War I’: ‘Where Australians Served During World War I’, Anzac Portal website, available here

[14] Including New Britain, New Ireland, German Samoa, and Nauru: ibid

[15] The exact figure, derived from the Australian War Memorial’s Roll of Honour, is 61,678: ‘Deaths as a Result of Service with Australian Units’, Australian War Memorial website, available here

[16] More than 150,000 Australians were wounded during the First World War: Craig Tibbitts, ‘Casualties of War’, Australian War memorial website, available here

[17] The hospital began as the Society for Destitute Children Asylum, opened in 1858; following its time as a military hospital, it was renamed the Prince of Wales Hospital and managed as an annex of Sydney Hospital; in 1963 it was restructured under one board with Prince Henry Hospital at Little Bay; in 1976 the Prince of Wales Children’s Hospital was established; in 1997 the Royal Hospital for Women transferred to the Randwick campus from Paddington: ‘Our History’, Prince of Wales Hospital website, available here.

[18] ‘Enlistment Statistics, First World War’, Australian War Memorial website, available here.

[19] Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, 1999, p. 93.

[20] Major-General Sir William Throsby Bridges, whose body was repatriated after he was killed at Gallipoli on 18 May 1915. As Chief of the Australian General Staff, he had been tasked with founding Australia’s first military college, the Royal Military College at Duntroon, in 1909 and became its inaugural Commandant in 1910. He was buried on Mount Pleasant, overlooking the College: ‘Major General William Throsby Bridges’, Australian War Memorial website, available here; ‘The Death and Burial of Sir William Bridges’, Australian War memorial website, available here. To mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the First World War, the body of an unknown Australian soldier was recovered from Adelaide Cemetery near Villers-Bretonneaux in France and transported to Australia and interred in the Australian War Memorial’s Hall of Memory, as part of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1993: ‘Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier’, Australian War Memorial website, available here

[21] Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, 1999; Neil Radford, ‘War Memorials for World War I’, Dictionary of Sydney website, available here; Bruce Scates, ‘Bereavement and Mourning (Australia)’, International Encyclopedia of the First World War website, 2016, available here

[22] Ken Inglis, for instance, estimates that over half the First World War memorials erected in Australia included the names of survivors alongside the fallen, a practice three times the rate, for instance, evidenced in New Zealand: Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, 1999, p.182. See also Vivienne Caldwell, Illawarra at War, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) thesis, Department of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 1999, pp. 89-90.  

[23] Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, 1999, pp. 183-4, cited in Vivienne Caldwell, Illawarra at War, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) thesis, Department of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 1999, p.90. Australia, South Africa, and India were the only participating countries not to introduce conscription during the First World War: ‘Conscription During the First World War’, Australian War Memorial website, available here

[24] ‘Randwick’s Soldiers: Proposed Memorial’, Evening News, 27 June 1917, p.4, available here

[25] Georgina Keep, ‘Randwick’s War and Peace: a Hundred Years of High Cross Park War Memorial’, Randwick City Council website, 20 March 2025, available here; ‘Meeting: Municipality of Randwick: Soldiers’ Memorial’, The Sun, 18 July 1919, p.4, available here; ‘Randwick Operatic Society’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 September 1919, p.19, available here

[26] Keep, ‘Randwick’s War and Peace’, op. cit.

[27] ‘Proposed Cenotaph for Randwick’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 1924, p.10, available here. Quarried at Tarana near Lithgow, the granite is the same distinctive pink stone later used in the lower parts of the Sydney Opera House: ‘Tarana Granite’, National Rock Garden website, available here

[28] ‘Randwick Cenotaph: Roll of Honour’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 April 1925, p.12, available here

[29] Copies of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph of the day, along with “coins in value from halfpenny up to a sovereign” were also included: ‘At Randwick Cenotaph’, Daily Telegraph, 27 April 1925, p.5, available here. Despite considerable conservation work on the cenotaph in the years since, the sealed objects, including the honour roll, have yet to be discovered: Keep, ‘Randwick’s War and Peace’, op. cit.

[30] ‘The Cenotaph’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 1925, p.10, available here

[31] ‘In Commemoration: Randwick Cenotaph’, Daily Telegraph, 4 May 1925, p.9, available here; ‘The Cenotaph’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 1925, p.10, available here

[32] Keep, ‘Randwick’s War and Peace’, op. cit.