Australians in Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 Memorial. Canberra, ACT, AUSTRALIA
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2BluFish
S 35° 18.012 E 149° 07.201
55H E 692760 N 6091603
The memorial, in the ACT, was instigated by a group wanting to commemorate Australians' participation in the Spanish Civil War.
Waymark Code: WM9QDT
Location: Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Date Posted: 09/19/2010
Views: 6
AUSTRALIANS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 1936 TO 1939 - War Memorial
The memorial is a wall of sandstone blocks with red brick courses. There is a low sandstone and brick parapet on its north east side. On the wall is a bronze plaque, headed AUSTRALIANS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 1936 TO 1939 above a bas relief map of the Iberian peninsular showing towns where major battles took place during the war. The bronze map was made by Dr Ross Bastiaan who has placed a number of similar plaques in Australia and other countries commemorating Australian military endeavours. Below this is a plaque with a description in both Spanish and English. There is another small plaque on the upper right of the wall in memory of the maker of the memorial, Netta Burns.
The pavement in front of the monument is made of pink and black granite cobblestones with a black circular pattern directly in front of the plaques.
The memorial was instigated by a group wanting to commemorate Australians' participation in the Spanish Civil War. The Australian War Memorial could not accommodate them as the men and women who went to support the republican cause were not 'Australian forces'. The Australian Capital Territory government assisted them to place the monument by Lake Burley Griffin and it was unveiled in 1993 by Lloyd Edmunds, one of the last surviving Australian members of the International Brigades.
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"We know little enough about the (Australian) volunteers we can identify but one characteristic is striking: 10 of the 66 were women - proportionally more than one would find in a conventional army. Otherwise they were not unusual.
More than a third were born outside Australia, a little higher than the adult population where 70 per cent were native born, and most of that third had started life in the United Kingdom...Of 52 volunteers whose occupations we know, 36 were attached to fighting groups and 16 nursed, organised, investigated or propagandised. Before they left, 27 of the 36 fighters were manual workers - seamen, shearers, a shearer's cook, a boiler maker, sugar workers and general labourers; three were Communist Party functionaries; two were unemployed; one was a writer; four were farmers; one a school teacher; and one was a poster artist. The 16 non-fighters (including 10 women) had been nurses and white collar workers: six nurses, one advertising copywriter, two students, one office worker; two had been pedlars.
Of the 27 whose politics are known, 22 were communists; two described themselves as anarchists, several were liberal democrats and three were Labor supporters"
Source : 'Australians in the Spanish Civil War' by Amirah Inglis (Sydney 1987).