Australian Memorials
The Database
The purpose of this database is to give family historians—and others—better access to the biographical information in Australian memorials.
The memorials fall into three groups. In one are the "national" memorials built by the Commonwealth and State governments to commemorate the casualties from each jurisdiction. In another are the civic memorials built in public places usually by local government councils. And in the third are the numerous semi-public memorials in the buildings or grounds of institutions such as churches, schools and cemeteries.
The database currently encompasses all the "national" memorials, several dozen of the civic memorials and a few semi-public memorials. It is a work-in-progress and contributions of inscriptions and photographs are welcome.
The database holds one record for every personal name on a memorial. No assumptions are made about the identities of the persons named so that if the same name appears twice on the same memorial the database will have two personal records. The information may comprise just the person's surname and initials but often there is more.
The information in each personal record has the same spelling as appears in the inscription, but it may not have the same form. To explain, a person's name will be shown in the record in mixed case instead of entirely capitalised. Likewise, dates are always converted to the ISO format YYYY-MM-DD. The data are not corrected or augmented from other sources except in one circumstance: if the memorial names a person's military unit we refer to other sources to ascertain whether the unit was Australian.
The information we have collected about the memorials themselves is far from complete. To this stage we have focused only on information that can be found on the memorial, notably the inscription and location. In transcribing the text we have not attempted to reproduce the monumental mason's art. We have preserved the case, the spelling and punctuation, and the line breaks, but not other features such as letter size, type, style, alignment, and direction.
Our main source of data has been photographs donated for illustration of this web site. Where practicable we have corrected our work by inspection of the memorial. In some other cases we have compared our work with resources available at the Australian War Memorial.
References to Inglis and Taylor mean, respectively:
- The K S Inglis collection, call number PR00944, in the Australian War Memorial. According to Professor Inglis this collection of papers and photographs is the main source of information for his book Sacred places: War memorials in the Australian landscape, MUP, 1998 (2001).
- Philip Taylor's thesis, Pro deo et patria: A survey of Victoria's Boer War memorials, 1997.
9 April 2002