banner

A+ A A-

Researching WW1 diggers and nurses

from Sunshine Coast region of Queensland


box_09

2014 was the centenary year of Australia's first deployment of soldiers to Europe to fight in the First World War.

The purpose of the Adopt a Digger Project is to commemorate the centenary by honouring the men and women from the (current) Sunshine Coast region of South-east Queensland who fought in World War One either with the Army, Navy or Airforce. Criteria for a soldier's inclusion is either that he was born in the district, or his next-of-kin was resident in the district, or he enlisted in the district or he is commemorated on a local honour board or memorial. This same criteria applies to our nurses. Since the inception of the project we have decided to include the settlers who took up land at Beerburrum Soldier Settlement from 1916 as the Settlement is such a significant piece of the region's WW1 history. Our criteria dates are 1914 to 1925.

The aim of this website is to create a database which records each soldier's WW1 military history and a brief personal history. This database will be a valuable source of reference for historians, researchers, descendants and school students, and will be a significant contribution to the social and historical military records of Australia, and particularly the  Sunshine Coast region.

We held an exhibition in April 2015 to commemorate the Anzac Centenary and to remember and honour "our boys".

glasshouse_hbHonour Boards are produced for many and varying purposes, both in peace and war time, by different organisations.

During the Great War they served the primary purpose of recognizing the many young and not so young folk who answered their country or empire’s call and enlisted, served, paid the ultimate price or were rejected for service.

These memorials usually listed the names of individuals and some even included photographs of the individual digger.

Honour scrolls, memorial gates, memorial halls, memorial Sports Grounds, memorial tree plantings and, in one case, a Soldier’s Memorial Hospital all served to recognise and honour our ANZAC diggers, airmen, seamen and nurses.

After the war small close-knit, parochial and patriotic communities honoured their fallen (and in some cases those who served) by building large memorial structures in prominent positions in the local community ‘hub’. These are the easy memorials to locate. Honour boards and scrolls were hung in prominent positions in the local School of Arts, Community or Memorial halls and these memorials are easier to locate if the hall is still in operation. The difficult ones to find are the small local community organizations’ memorials, eg church, lodge, band, sporting clubs….

The three shires that comprised the (current) Sunshine Coast area all produced large honour boards that commemorated ‘all’ the personnel from that shire. The information for these boards seems to have been gathered by public ‘subscription’ and are by no means a complete record.

This project hopes to record for posterity all the known WW1 memorials of the Sunshine Coast region, identify the individuals named on those memorials, correct the errors and to try to locate the ones that we find reference to through our research.

Please continue to come back to this page as it will be an ongoing project to update the information, and if you know of the location of a Sunshine Coast memorial please contact us.

See images of our honour boards and other memorials on our photo gallery. Click link below.

http://www.adoptadigger.org/gallery/honour-boards