In March 1919, just a few months after the fighting had ended, the mayoress of Adelaide convened a meeting in the Town Hall. Its purpose was to raise a women’s war memorial, and all the principal charities and patriotic associations were involved. The League of Loyal Women, as they called themselves, faced the usual debates and choices. Should their memorial be utilitarian or monumental, a hospital or some ‘symbolical figure’; where should it be sited; how was the money to be raised?1 It was decided:

The memorial was to be in the nature of a shrine and the site a hallowed spot where the mothers wives sisters and friends . . . [could] place their tributes of love . . . 2

For that reason the women rejected a site on North Terrace where South Australia’s official war memorial was eventually to be raised. They chose instead a piece of parkland, bordered by the river and the cathedral. Here, they decided, ‘a garden of memory’ might be made. And not just any garden, either. Having lost two brothers in the war, one in Gallipoli and one in France, Dorothy Gilbert had a very clear idea in mind.

It is the wish of my Executive Committee [to borrow the designs of the Imperial War Graves Commission] making for the women who will never see the graves of their men, a place of quiet and repose, a ‘Garden of the Unforgotten’.3

Hedged with yew and cyprus, fragrant with rose and rosemary, it would ‘[c]reate for us in miniature, in the heart of our city, a garden which should instantly call to mind those other gardens covering many an area of Northern France and on the slopes of Gallipoli’.4

What Dorothy Gilbert called a ‘garden’ looked like a graveyard. Internal paths were set down in the figure of a cross, and flowerbeds of rosemary made to resemble plots. Both were aligned with the two great motifs of Europe’s war cemeteries, Sir Reginald Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice and Sir Edward Lutyens’ Stone of Remembrance: they ‘appeal to us tremendously’, Gilbert wrote to the Commission, ‘because most of us will never see the graves of our men [our] design [will] shadow [your own]’.5

A Garden of the Unforgotten: Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice stands guard over the imagined graves of a memorial garden. Great care was taken to replicate the designs of the Imperial War Graves Commission cemeteries in Belgium and France, enabling an imaginary journey to those real graves a world away. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

The two great motifs of Europe’s war cemeteries: Sir Reginald Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice and Sir Edward Lutyens’ Stone of Remembrance sketched on the plan for Pennington Gardens. In fact, the cross was a collaboration of several Great War architects, and all found its ambiguity appealing. The religious (such as Dorothy Gilbert) saw this as the paramount symbol of Christianity; others could relate to its martial quality, a sword set squarely at the cross’s centre. This made the cross acceptable to many religious faiths within the British Empire. It also spoke to a growing number of agnostics. Dorothy Gilbert was the first of many to borrow this design from the Imperial War Graves Commission. Sketch from the minutes of the Women's War Memorial Committee, SRG89 courtesy State Library of South Australia.

Recreating the cemeteries of Europe in a stretch of Adelaide parkland was not to be thought ‘morbid’, the The League of Loyal Women insisted. On the one hand, it reflected a sense of belonging to an Empire so many had died for:

. . . wherever our men lie and wherever that cross is seen throughout the world, and throughout the centuries, it shall be known as the British Cross of the Great War. If that is to be so we should like our Memorial one link in the chain . . . 6

On the other, it made possible an imaginary pilgrimage; not an actual voyage, but a journey of the heart and the mind. Standing in her Garden of Remembrance, Dorothy Gilbert imagined similar garden cemeteries on the other side of the world.

A journey of the heart: The figure of a mother reaches out towards the spirit of her son. Raynor Hoff’s arresting sculpture is a key feature of South Australia’s National War Memorial on North Terrace, Adelaide. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

The families of the men who have fallen can perhaps appreciate better than others the form of the Memorial Cross and Stone. They have seen both pictured in the book sent to them by the War Graves Commission. The Women’s Memorial is in the form of a garden [featuring] an exact reproduction of those two monuments, so that anyone entering . . . will feel at once that somewhere, on some battlefront, the man they personally know is lying under the shadow of the [same] War Cross facing the [same] War Stone . . . 7

The Loyal Women of Adelaide opened their memorial with a funeral. In April of 1922, in the week preceding Anzac Day, the names of the fallen were placed in an urn, taken to the cross, and buried beneath its foundation stone. Amongst the thousands of slips of paper were the names of Dorothy Gilbert’s two brothers, one buried near a similar cross in France, the other, whose body was never recovered, swallowed up by the carnage of Gallipoli. ‘The graves of the front’, Dorothy Gilbert declared, had been linked forever ‘with the homeland’. And the Garden of Remembrance had laid their memory to rest. 8

Opening a memorial with a funeral: Soldiers and mourners gather for the dedication of the Cross of Sacrifice in Adelaide. The number of floral tributes remind us of the role memorials played as a focal point for grief: they were surrogate tombs for bodies lost in battle. The Australasian, 6 May 1922 courtesy National Library of Australia.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This account is based on a detailed scan of the League of Loyal Women’s Papers SRG684 and the Minutes of the Women’s War Memorial Committee SRG89, both held in the State Library of South Australia. For further discussion of women’s place in the culture of commemoration and their representation in memorials themselves see Ken Inglis, ‘Men, Women and War Memorials: Anzac Australia’, Daedalus, vol. 116, no. 4, Fall 1987, pp. 35–59; Catherine Speck, ‘Women’s War Memorials and Citizenship, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 11, no. 23, 1996, pp. 129–145; for the use of the cross in memorials see Bruce Scates and Rebecca Wheatley, ‘War Memorials’ in Jay Winter (ed), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. 528–558.

1 Register, 14 March 1919; Women’s War Memorial Committee, Minutes of the General Committee, 12 March 1919; Women’s War Memorial Committee, The Women’s Memorial to Fallen in the Great War: Objects, Adelaide nd, Women’s War Memorial Committee of South Australia Papers, State Library of South Australia, SRG 89.

2 Women’s War Memorial General Committee Minutes, 5 November 1919, ibid.

3 Register, 26 April 1923; Dorothy Gilbert to WR Letharby (IWGC), 23 August 1919; Dorothy Gilbert to JE Talbot (IWGC), 18 December 1919, League of Loyal Women Press Clippings, State Library of South Australia, SRG 684/2 for personal details see Dorothy Gilbert, ‘Memories of Pusey Vale and the Gilbert Family, 1839–1923’, PRG 266/14 Mortlock Library.

4 Dorothy Gilbert to Lord Mayor, 16 January 1920, ibid.

5 ibid; Dorothy Gilbert to W.R. Letharby, 23 August 1919, ibid.

6 ibid.

7 Women’s War Memorial Committee, The Women’s Memorial, Adelaide nd, ibid.

8 Register, 24 March 1922.