Aramac War Memorial

Aramac War Memorial is a heritage-listed memorial at Lodge Street, Aramac, Barcaldine Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed and built by F M Allan in 1924. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.

The Aramac War Memorial was unveiled on 12 April 1924 by Aramac Shire Chairman, E W Bowyer in lieu of the Queensland Governor who was unable to attend. It was designed and executed by monumental masonry firm, F M Allan and cost £700 in total; £580 for the monument and £48 for the fence. Funds were raised by the Memorial Committee, a group of mostly young women who held entertainments and collected public subscriptions. The stone memorial honours the 132 local men who served in the First World War, including fifteen dead and eleven wounded. The memorial serviced the whole of the Aramac Shire and is located in the main intersection of the town of Aramac. It is of a comparatively large scale and dominates the small town. The area of Aramac was first settled in the late 1850s after the area was discovered by European explorers Nathaniel Buchanan and William Landsborough. The town reserve was gazetted on 26 June 1869. Settlement was slow and sheep and cattle stations difficult to establish due to the remoteness of the area and the lack of water. By the late 1870s most land settlement had taken place. 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 me

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