Oxley War Memorial is a heritage-listed memorial at 1218 Oxley Road, Oxley, Queensland, Australia. It was built in 1920. It is also known as Oxley Memorial Park and Oxley Place. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 4 July 2006.
History
Today, the Oxley War Memorial sits on the crest of a ridge on the corner of Oxley Road and Bannerman Street in Oxley, where it is an important visual component of the streetscape setting on a busy arterial road.
The War Memorial was originally erected by local residents on a small parcel of reserved land on the corner of Oxley Road & Ipswich Road. It was unveiled on Saturday 12 February 1921 by the wife of Cecil Elphinstone, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Oxley. In 1929 Brisbane City Council acquired the land on which the monument stood from the previous proprietors who were the registered trustees of the reserve. The memorial was moved to its present location in the 1980s due to traffic requirements.
The memorial was funded by public subscriptions at an establishment cost of about . The mason was F Williams & Co of Ipswich, who was also responsible for the memorials at: Toogoolawah, One Mile, West Ipswich & Western Suburbs Ipswich (1917) Colinton & Mount Alford (1918) Booval & Bundamba (1919) Boonah, Maroon & Oxley (1920) Esk & Toombul Shire at Nundah (1921) the Weeping Mother Memorial at Gatton (c.1922) Warwick (1923-4) Ipswich Cemetery Cenotaph (1932).
Significance of war memorials in Queensland
Australia, and Queensland in particular, had few civic monuments before the First World War. The memorials erected in the wake of the war became our first national monuments. Australia lost 60,000 from a population of about four million, representing one in five of those who served. The casualty rate of the Australian volunteer military forces was significantly and proportionally higher than any of the other combatant groups, claiming 20% of the Australian volunteers who served, and 1.5% of the total Australian population. Australia's maturity as a nation and continuing commitment to the "motherland" were proven beyond doubt. No previous or subsequent war has made such a devastating 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 often commemorate those who served, 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 was favoured in the southern states, where overall responsibility for the approval of war memorials fell under the jurisdiction of a Board made up of artists and architects.
Although there are many different types of memorials in Queensland, the digger statue is the most common. It was the most popular choice of communities responsible for erecting the memorials, seen as embodying the ANZAC spirit and representing the qualities of the ideal Australian: loyalty, courage, youth, innocence and masculinity.
The digger and the little digger statues are an iconic Queensland memorial form. Oxley Memorial Park is an exemplar of this class of cultural places.