Holy Ground and Mortal Promises: the campaigns for the Mothers' Memorial, Toowoomba

Abstract

In 1922, an austere column to commemorate Toowoomba's wartime dead was raised at the symbolic centre of the city. It ensured that citizens in their daily rounds would be reminded of Toowoomba's fallen soldiers and, more particularly, the grief of their mothers who had initiated and led the local fund-raising effort. Later proposals to re-locate the Mothers' Memorial excited considerable acrimony, and indeed the controversy of 1984–85 is remembered as a singularly divisive civic issue in the city's recent past. The controversy repays historical attention, because as Ken Inglis has written the close study of individual memorials make legible ‘harmonies, conflicts and accommodations’ that ‘yield understandings of what people cared about and stood for.’ This article examines the localised making of this piece of ‘holy ground’, and argues that themes of maternal sacrifice, the symbolism of urban centrality and the ‘sacred covenant’ of public trusteeship were central to the sacralisation of urban space in this instance. All of these underpinned the campaign to retain the memorial in its original setting, when quasi-religious themes came to infuse and reinforce more familiar arguments for heritage value and historic conservation in an unusually explicit way.