Occasional Tales from the Mountain No. 07

Occasional Tales from the Mountain No.7 Memorialising war: how the hills honoured their WW1 Diggers How Australians memorialise wars and conflicts in a physical sense has shifted over the years and continues to change. In the hills after World War 1, as elsewhere, settling on an appropriate memorial sometimes itself became another deeply contested terrain. This story, up to the early years of the 21st century, is told fully in the late Ken Inglis’s spectacular piece of scholarship, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, first published in 1998, with a third updated edition published in 2008. Even before the Great War Armistice was signed, communities in Australia had set about the task of commemorating all those who had served and died in a war from which 60,000 Australians would never return. Curiously, the practice of including the names of the living as well as the dead on these memorials was peculiarly antipodean. In much of Europe and elsewhere only the names of the dead are recorded. One reason for this may be that initially, many such efforts took the form of simple honour boards, which served the dual, rather crude purpose of a recruitment tool as the Great War ground on, its toll increased and conscription for service was twice rejected by the Australian people. The stories behind such monuments and honour rolls, and even more importantly the stories of the individuals recorded upon them, are often pivotal in communities around Victoria. In small towns and settlements these memorials are sometimes one of the few tangible records of a community, even acting as a default register of the pioneering families of a district. In its immediate aftermath, just how to commemorate the war sometimes became the subject of intense local debate. Memorials were effectively a substitute for the graves of those Australians who lay in foreign fields, their loved ones at home otherwise denied a physical place to mourn.1 Often, they were modest: dour obelisks or rigid marble statuary depicting an ANZAC soldier (who incidentally was sometimes modelled on an Italian, as pictured left).2 Many such installations were derided at the time as inartistic and debasing public taste.3 In Victoria, a War Memorial Advisory Board was established to give advice to local communities on what might be a suitable memorial. The idea of a more utilitarian memorial, such as a public hall, was frowned upon by some on the grounds that it would be unbecoming for dancing, watching moving pictures, or other such jollification to take place in a venue honouring the district’s fallen. Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society Ironically enough, many soldier settlements opted for just such practical options, while some returned soldiers felt the money could be better spent supporting the families of those lost in the war or to assist distressed returned Diggers.4 The Kalorama Peace Memorial The tale of this distinctive memorial atop Mount Dandenong reminds us of the deep local significance often attached to such places. Installed after World War 1, this tribute to “the Peace of 1919” sits in a small reserve at an intersection in Kalorama.5 It ticked all the boxes of being an abstract memorial with underlying symbolic content that the statelevel authorities sought. While not the only memorial to the peace in Victoria, the Kalorama memorial has garnered some attention over the years. A granite block, 1.65 metres tall, sits on a plinth of smaller granite pieces, the rocks unearthed during local roadworks. A bronze plaque affixed to the stone was designed by Charles Douglas Richardson (1852-1932), a celebrated Melbourne sculptor. Even before its unveiling, the magazine `Table Talk’ described the plaque as “one of the most beautiful pieces of bronze work yet produced in Melbourne”, noting A dove in high relief, bearing an olive branch in its beak, symbolises the Dawn of Peace, and the Rising Sun appears above the names of all those who left [Mount] Dandenong to fight in the Great War. The whole tablet is supported by a richly graven laurel wreath.6 Discussions about a memorial on Mount Dandenong had begun in earnest in August 1919. The first part of the peace memorial story is centred, perhaps not surprisingly, on local politics as committees jostled over how best to honour those locals who had served. Even though this was a small community, there were strong views about what sort of memorial it should have, based on aesthetics but also (as always) on cost. The Peace Memorial Committee was largely driven by the local St Michael and All Angels Anglican Church. Such committees were not uncommon and were often linked to a local church. But at Mount Dandenong there was also a Reserves Committee composed of local worthies, which governed the use of parcels of public land and whose members also had strong views about what sort of memorial would fit into the landscape. Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society Land for the reserve upon which the monument was to sit was donated by Ellis Jeeves, son of one of the earliest settlers in the district. The location, known earlier as Jeeves Gap, was the point at which the old and new main roads met. Also known as the `Busy Corner’, it was a focal point for the local community. There was a store and post office, later a Methodist church, and eventually a motor garage. Today we know it as the Five Ways. Ellis Jeeves was a parishioner of St Michael’s and also a member of the Reserves Committee. His eldest son, Fred, was killed in action in France at the age of 30 in August 1918.7 The Reserves Committee’s minute books for the period in which the debate is played out survive. Evidently, the first design submitted by the Peace Memorial Committee – centred on a large cross – fell far short of the Reserves Committee’s expectations, as the minutes record: While the Reserves Committee is heartily in accord with the movement to erect a memorial of the war, it was felt that the design submitted was of a rather funereal character to be used in connection with a reserve for the recreation of the people, and it was decided to ask the Memorial Committee to further consider the matter with a view to the submission of a design that would be a little more suitable in connection with a reserve of this character.8 Debate over the design was still going on two months later. The Reserves Committee moved that while it had `no objection to the design as a design for its erection in its proper place’, in its view this was clearly not in the place allocated on Mount Dandenong. It went on to say at a later meeting: In view of the purpose of the reservation … the erection of a cross is not in keeping with such purpose. [The Reserves Committee] hopes in further consideration that the Memorial Committee could fix on a more suitable memorial in keeping with the surroundings and at the same time have the effect of celebrating the Allies great victory …9 The motion was carried 4:1 and the Peace Memorial Committee was duly sent back to the drawing board. The jousting ended three months later, in January 1920, when an agreed design was settled upon, and the Reserves Committee voted unanimously to accept it.10 The next step in the memorial process was hauling a large slab of granite into place. Jack Lundy-Clarke grew up at Mount Dandenong in the early twentieth century and later penned a record of the early years of settlement, entitled Mountain of Struggle.11 According to LundyClarke, the discovery of a nest of granite boulders during local road works inspired the idea of a monument suited to the locale. Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society A slab of rock weighing about 10 tonnes was hauled downhill to the site by a team of seven horses belonging to the road contractors, the Bladin brothers. The difficulty of using a team for such a task became apparent and one horse, named Pride, took the lead. Unfortunately, such was the strain endured by this one beast that Pride made its own peace and sadly died from these exertions two days later. The stone was eventually manoeuvred into place by one man using a mechanical tree puller, before it was cut by hand into the necessary blocks using drills and wedges. A large crowd attended as the memorial was unveiled on Anzac Day 1921 by Chaplain Colonel Walter Ernest Dexter DSO, MC, DCM (1873-1950), who had served with bravery as a trooper in the Boer War and then shared the dangers of ordinary soldiers as a chaplain at Gallipoli and in France during World War 1. According to the writer Nettie Palmer (1885-1964), the idea of commemorating the peace was that of architect and artist Percy Kernot (1866-1943), who lived for a few years at `Upalong’, Mount Dandenong. Kernot was a churchwarden at St Michael and All Angels, and he was also secretary of the Peace Memorial Committee.12 (When it came to renovating the Peace Memorial in 2010, it is also noteworthy that it was again the church which successfully sought funding and managed the project.) A socially progressive writer, Nettie Palmer, lived in the Dandenongs with her author husband Vance from 1915 to 1917 and again from 1919 to 1925. Many years later, she waxed lyrical over the monument in a slim history entitled The Dandenongs, published in 1952. She described it romantically as “perhaps the most significant landmark in the Dandenongs … so modest and unpretentious that it might easily pass unnoticed.” Palmer was conflicted by the idea of empire, the horror of war itself and the sacrifice of Australia’s sons to the imperial war machine. She recalled the wording on the monument’s plaque as: “In memory of the Peace, 1919”. In fact, the inscription reads: To commemorate the peace of 1919 These men of Mount Dandenong served the Empire in the Great War 1914 – 1918. There follow the names of 21 men associated with the district who served, three of them never to return. Nettie Palmer noted that “compared with the usual ugly memorials in country towns … this small arrangement in stone is a miracle of grace and feeling. It gathers into it the spirit of place; it evokes memories of obscure lives carrying out a chosen task with courage and dignity”.13 In Sacred Places, Ken Inglis suggests that Palmer was simply struggling to reconcile her own composition of socialism and patriotism and the great divisions the war had rent in Australian society. Of the Kalorama memorial, he says: “Here as elsewhere the inscription is comfortably about war and empire as well as peace.”14 Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society For all of that, it is interesting that a second separate Kalorama memorial was unveiled in 1952 by the then Governor of Victoria, Sir Dallas Brooks, to commemorate the service of locals in both world wars, rather than the more common practice of adding to the existing one. This more prosaic stone cairn of roughly similar dimensions is located in a different part of the village, next to the local sports reserve. It lists no names. There is a further twist to this story. Even before the war had ended and long before the peace memorial was unveiled, work had begun on the planting of a roadside avenue of honour further along the ridge at Ferny Creek, a section of road duly renamed Anzac Avenue. First mooted in 1916, it comprised chestnut and other exotic trees, each with a name plate and eventually a tree guard. The avenue was intended to honour the service of “boys from the Sassafras and Ferny Creek districts”, some kilometres distant from their comrades in arms at Mount Dandenong.15 Among the “boys” are the names of three women, all nurses with links to the area. However, the names recorded included servicemen from further afield such as Harold Gutman from Olinda and even Robert Camm from Monbulk. Curiously, the names of just two of the 21 Mount Dandenong servicemen also appear on the index of trees planted along Anzac Avenue in Ferny Creek. These were the Farndon brothers, the sons of an early farming family at Mount Dandenong. The appearance of the names of servicemen (and more rarely women) on multiple memorials and honour rolls after the First World War was not unusual. There was sometimes community uproar at the listings, especially when someone’s husband or son or brother was left off. More often, communities gathered up as many names as possible, sometimes no matter how tenuous the link. A good example of this is the honour board now hanging in the lobby of the Ferny Creek Primary School. It lists Ernest Orr among the fallen. Ernie Orr was shot during the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 and died from his wounds in a London hospital almost seven months later. He is buried at Wandsworth Cemetery. Ernie could only have been a pupil at the then One Tree Hill state school very briefly. The family actually lived in Fern Tree Gully (his name appears on a Fern Tree Gully school memorial later shifted to the nearby arboretum in Dorset Road). Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society The Orrs moved to Coburg in 1907, so Ernie’s name can also be found on at least two memorials in Coburg and also in Canberra. Anzac Avenue, Ferny Creek-Sassafras This was officially opened in April 1920 by Captain Stanley Melbourne Bruce, who had won the Military Cross at Gallipoli, and was by 1920 representing the district as the federal member for the vast electorate of Flinders. Bruce would in time become the 8th Prime Minister of Australia from 1923 to 1929 and eventually Viscount Bruce. This rather patrician character had not been the first pick for the task. The then Prime Minister Billy Hughes (1862-1952), the “Little Digger” who then owned a holiday farm in Clarkmont Road, Sassafras, was scheduled to do the honours but couldn’t make it. So, it was left to Bruce to supervise proceedings. His wife Ethel cut the ribbon on the muddy stretch of road in Ferny Creek to mark the formal opening of Anzac Avenue on 14 April 1920. The stone shelter on the edge of the forest at the Sherbrooke Rd corner came later. It houses an index to the 103 local men and women once memorialised by the trees. (Again, Ernie Orr was among them). Interestingly, the index does not distinguish between the living and the dead. It was dedicated by Lieutenant-Colonel (later Sir) George Knox MLA on 20 May 1939. It is interesting to note that, as in Kalorama, those locals who served in World War 2 were not later added to the monument or memorialised elsewhere. A small memorial was erected decades later on the Sassafras Village Green honouring “all who have served our nation”. How and why the Farndon brothers also made it to Anzac Avenue in Ferny Creek is at first sight a mystery. Their names are way down towards the end of the list. Perhaps the answer lies in their comparative local celebrity as decorated war heroes (as winners individually of the Military Cross and the Military Medal) but more likely it was because their mother was managing a guesthouse in Sassafras at the time. Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society Reginald Howard Farndon, better known as Reg, (1892-1950) and Lester Ronald Farndon, also known as Len, (1896-1983) grew up at Mount Dandenong, two of six children of William and May Farndon, who selected land there in the late 1890s. Their father, Bill Farndon, had previously farmed near Warburton. Their mother, May, was the daughter of Howard Tapley Clarton (1837-1903), also known as John. Grandpa Clarton was a late nineteenth century land boomer, a bigamist, and in the language of the day something of `a bounder and a cad’. His life journey had taken him from Mauritius to India, South Australia and finally Melbourne where died a chronic alcoholic in 1903 but not before having fathered 15 children.16 Reg and Len attended the Mount Dandenong primary school with their three siblings. Their father grew raspberries and laboured for other local farmers. The family also built and ran a guesthouse, Callum House, and later a hall opposite, but money was evidently tight. By the time the two young men reached adulthood and headed off to war, all was not well in the Farndon home. Callum House, the hall and 12 acres were put up for sale in 1914. In 1916, the guesthouse was leased out. Their parents separated. May initially returned to Warburton to work as a housekeeper and their youngest sibling, Douglas, was sent to live with his grandmother in St Kilda. Charged with abandoning his child without means of support, Bill was ordered to pay maintenance and costs, or in default face imprisonment for three months.17 While Bill Farndon continued to live at Mt Dandenong until his death in 1940, May worked for a time managing guesthouses at Sassafras, Healesville and Warburton before moving to St Kilda. In 1916, she renamed the Sassafras guesthouse `Valima’ as `Reglester House’ after her absent sons Reginald and Lester, then away at the war. Both Farndon boys survived the war. Later, Bill and May seem to have been sufficiently reconciled by 1932 to attend together the wedding of their youngest son, Doug, at which Reg was best man and the groomsmen included none other than the cricketer Don Bradman, connected to the bride’s family through their sporting goods business. May Farndon died in 1951. The Farndon family is recalled locally today through Farndons Road and Farndon’s Hall, which among other things is home to the Mt Dandenong and District Historical Society. Having enlisted in January 1915, Reg Farndon served in Egypt, at Gallipoli and in France in the 21st Battalion AIF. Promoted through the ranks to Lieutenant, in 1919 he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery under fire at Mont St Quentin in September 1918. To this was added a Bar, again for bravery under fire, in October 1918 at Montbrehain, the last action involving Australian infantry on the Western Front. Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society Discharged in 1920, he returned to civilian life as a clerk before enlisting again in 1940 after the outbreak of World War 2. Now with the rank of Captain, he embarked for Singapore in April 1941. He was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and interned at the notorious Changi POW camp. Liberated in September 1945, he returned to Australia the following month. Reg returned to civilian life as the director a sporting goods firm but died at the age of 58 in January 1950.18 Lester Farndon was working as a clerk at H.V. McKay when he enlisted in March 1915, giving his occupation as farm labourer, and was assigned to the 23rd Battalion AIF. He would serve at Gallipoli for five months and then in France from early 1916 as a despatch runner. In December that year he was awarded the Military Medal for bravery in the field on the Somme. Len was wounded on multiple occasions. He was repatriated to Australia early in 1919 and died at Ringwood in 1983 at the age of 87.191 There are, of course, many other memorials, honour boards and places of commemoration across the Dandenongs, including the peripatetic Belgrave war memorial. The Upwey RSL sub-branch has a museum and a couple of spoils of war erected out front. The Monbulk RSL sub-branch also has a rather strong collection of historical texts. And then there is the Kokoda commemoration stretching from Upper Ferntree Gully to One Tree Hill. But there is something appealing about of a memorial to the Peace of 1919 … even though it seems we have learnt very little from it. John Schauble · This is an edited version of an address delivered to the Sherbrooke Foothills Historical Society’s annual general meeting on Remembrance Day, 11 November 2025. 1 The bodies of only two Australian soldiers are known to have been repatriated: Major-General Sir William Throsby Bridges (1861-1915), commander of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), who died after being shot by a sniper at Gallipoli. His body was returned and buried at Duntroon, Canberra in September 1915. The body of an unknown Australian soldier was recovered from a cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux in France and reinterred at the Australian War Memorial on 11 November 1993. 2 Ironically, sometimes these statues provided by local stonemasons or imported from Italy, were thought to be modelled upon northern Italian Alpini soldiers rather than Australian Diggers: Judith McKay, `Putting the Digger on a Pedestal’, Historic Environment, Vol 5, No.3, (1986), pp. 5-19, at pp.15-16; see also John Schauble, `Sometimes Anzacs are just Botticelli blokes’, Age 31.12.1986, p.3; K.S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1998, pp.161-66. 3 McKay, p.5. 4 Inglis, Sacred Places, pp.141-42, McKay, p.8. 5 Formerly known as Mount Dandenong North, the area was renamed Kalorama in 1926. 6 Quoted in Healesville and Yarra Glen Guardian, 18.9.1920. 7 Another son, Hubert, also served in World War 1. Both are listed on the Kalorama memorial. After Ellis Jeeves was killed in a buggy accident in Sassafras in 1921, the site of the memorial was named Ellis Reserve. 8 Minutes, Mount Dandenong Reserves Committee, August 16th, 1919, (held by the Mt Dandenong and District Historical Society). 9 Minutes, Mount Dandenong Reserves Committee, October 11th, 1919. 10 Minutes, Mount Dandenong Reserves Committee, January 10th, 1920. 11 John Lundy-Clarke, Mountain of Struggle, MS held by the Mt Dandenong and District Historical Society, pp.58-59. Lundy-Clarke’s memoir was produced in the mid-1970s and revised versions of the manuscript were also circulated. Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society 12 Lilydale Express, 5 March 1920. 13 Nettie Palmer, The Dandenongs, The National Press, Melbourne, 1952, p.57. 14 Inglis, Sacred Places, pp.228-29. 15 Argus, 23 April 1918, p.7. 16 John Edward Tapley (aka Howard Tapley Clarton) 1837-1903. 17 Prahran Telegraph, 15.5.1915, p.6. 18 National Archives of Australia: B2455, FARNDON R; B883, VX39341; http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/changi_research.html; Argus 27.1.1950, p. 6. 19 National Archives of Australia: B2455, FARNDON L R Mount Dandenong and District Historical Society