By Tony Wright
The crowd gathers early to commemorate Anzac Day beneath Australia’s oldest Lone Pine at Wattle Park, Burwood, in Melbourne’s east.
Each year since 2001, hundreds of people have flocked to the service, which is held in the park a week before the actual day – April 25 – to avoid clashing with the big Anzac Day parade through Melbourne’s streets and the service at the Shrine of Remembrance.
David Laird stands ready beneath the Lonesome Pine with “Clarrie’s Flag”, the banner of the 7th Battalion, for the early Anzac ceremony at Wattle Park.Credit: Joe Armao
This year, it will be held even earlier – on April 13 – to also avoid clashing with Easter.
Those attending will be welcomed by a lone piper and will witness a parade of the largest collection of World War I military banners – plus those of WWII and Vietnam War units – outside of Melbourne’s Anzac Day march.
A full Anzac service will take place, including a catafalque party, wreath laying and a minute’s silence, with a recital by the Melbourne Tramways Band.
Wattle Park’s own history is deeply entwined in the events that give lasting life to the word Anzac.
The park was, in the years between World War I and WWII, the training ground for the 24th Battalion (Kooyong Regiment), which spent many dangerous and exhausting weeks holding Lone Pine, Gallipoli, in 1915.
More than 20,000 people attended the first trooping of the colours of the battalion in the park in 1929, a ceremony that continued each year well into the 1930s under the battalion’s Lieutenant-Colonel Stanley Savige, the founder of Legacy, which supports veterans’ families.
The ashes of former Melbourne Lord Mayor Sir Frank Selleck, who served with the 24th Battalion in WWI and became the inaugural treasurer of Legacy, were scattered in the park in 1976.
The Lone Pine at the Shrine of Remembrance, pictured in 2008, before it became diseased and died.Credit: Gary Medlicott
The annual Anzac ceremony at Wattle Park takes place in the shadow of a towering old Turkish red pine – Pinus brutia – grown from a single cone taken from the destroyed “lonesome pine” that gave its name to one of the fiercest battles on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
The Battle of Lone Pine took the lives of 2,277 Australian soldiers and between 5000 and 6000 Turkish defenders.
Just four trees were grown from that single cone, brought home by a Victorian soldier, Sergeant Keith McDowell, whose 23rd Battalion took duties at Lone Pine turn-about with the 24th.
He gave the cone to his wife’s aunt, Emma Gray, who lived at Grassmere, a village near Warrnambool.
It took her more than 10 years to propagate four seedlings. One went to the Warrnambool Botanic Gardens, where it still stands; another to a plot next to the Sisters Memorial Hall near Terang (where it was destroyed by lightning several years ago); and one to the Shrine of Remembrance, where it later eventually became diseased and died.
The first of them was dedicated at Wattle Park on May 7, 1933, in honour of the 24th battalion.
Australia’s oldest Lone Pine, grown from a cone brought home from Gallipoli by a Victorian soldier and planted in 1933 in Wattle Park, Burwood.Credit: Joe Armao
(Other Lone Pines in Australia, notably at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, are Aleppo Pines, or Pinus halepensis. Champions of Wattle Park’s Turkish red pine say the Aleppo was not the species of the original Lone Pine and those in Australia were probably grown from a cone taken from one of numerous logs used by the Turks to cover their trenches.)
The Lone Pine’s significance resonates deeply with another Victorian-raised battalion of World War I, too: the 7th.
Each year, a member of the Wattle Park Heritage Committee, David Laird, hoists the 100-year-old banner of the 7th Battalion, in which his grandfather, Fred Laird, served.
The battalion remains the only military unit to have had four of its soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross for valour in a single engagement.
A plaque explaining the significance of Wattle Park’s lone pine.Credit: Joe Armao
During the furious Battle of Lone Pine, the four soldiers of the 7th Battalion – Corporal A. S. Burton, Acting Corporal W. Dunstan, Lieutenant W. Symons and Captain F. H. Tubb – held their trench against repeated attacks by vastly superior numbers of Turkish soldiers.
The banner of the 7th was commissioned by the grieving mother of two young men from Mount Martha who were killed at Gallipoli.
Private Lance Blannin-Ferguson died on the day of the landing at Anzac Cove, April 25, 1915. His brother, Private Daryl Blannin-Ferguson, was killed 13 days later.
In 1925, their widowed mother, Kate Blannin-Ferguson, gave the embroidered banner to a 7th Battalion friend of her lost boys, Lance Corporal Clarrie Wignell, of Euroa.
The banner became known as “Clarrie’s Flag”, and has been paraded at every march, memorial and church service involving the 7th Battalion ever since.
Wignell passed it on for safe keeping to Fred Laird, the son of one of his fellow soldiers, Sergeant Fred Laird.
It has, in turn, come to the keeping of Fred’s son, David, who lives almost within sight of Wattle Park.
Those attending the Anzac service on April 13 will be surrounded by numerous reminders of war, including a bronze bas-relief of the Anzac area of Gallipoli by Melbourne’s Dr Ross Bastian.
Beside Wattle Park’s Lone Pine stands another memorial to a lost soldier of the 7th.
A stone clocktower was raised in 1948, commissioned by Zilpa Bennett, mother of Royston Bennett, who died in 1916 during the fighting at Pozieres on the Western Front in France.
The Anzac service at Wattle Park was established in 2001 by the Melbourne Tramways Band as an adjunct of its regular concerts in the park, which began 85 years ago.
It has been run since by the Wattle Park Heritage Foundation, established by the band’s executive officer Ed Bright and former Box Hill Mayor Tom Thorpe.
And lest the big old Lone Pine reach the end of its life, another younger pine, propagated from a cone of the original tree, also grows nearby.
And so the tradition is guaranteed to go on at Wattle Park, where Anzac Day comes early each year.