Qualla: Montville Memorial Precinct

Montville Memorial Precinct: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Most war memorials honour the men who went. The gates at Montville honour them too, but they also do something almost no other monument in Australia does: they carve in stone the names of six men who volunteered and were rejected. In a village this small, set high in the green Blackall Range above the Sunshine Coast, everyone knew who had stepped forward and who had not. To leave the rejected off the roll would have been to mark them with an absence. So Montville put them on, under the heading that everyone could read. It is a quiet act of fairness, set in marble, that has outlasted the war that prompted it.

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Montville Memorial Precinct: A Village in the Range

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Montville sits about 450 metres up in the Blackall Range, west of the Sunshine Coast, a village of timber shopfronts and Devonshire-tea cafes that draws visitors from across Australia. At its commercial heart is a leafy enclave the locals call the Village Green, a small triangula...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Montville Memorial Precinct: The Gates and the Rejected

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The memorial gates were unveiled on Armistice Day, 11 November 1921, three years to the day after the guns of the Great War fell silent. Four stone pillars carry wrought-iron gates and fencing in a low semicircle. The marble slabs record the local men who enlisted, thirty-three n...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Montville Memorial Precinct: Six Trees, Planted by Children

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Across the Close from the gates, six tall weeping figs line the northern edge of the Village Green. They were not planted by dignitaries. In September 1923, schoolchildren from the nearby Montville State School put them in the ground as an Arbour Day project, after the head teach...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Montville Memorial Precinct: The Maker's Hand

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The gates came from the workshop of A. L. Petrie and Son, the most prolific maker of war memorials in Queensland in that era. Andrew Lang Petrie belonged to a family woven through the colony's history: grandson of Andrew Petrie, who oversaw works during Moreton Bay's penal days, ...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Montville Memorial Precinct: Dawn on Anzac Day

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The precinct is not a museum piece; it works. Each year on Anzac Day, the village gathers here before first light. The crowd stands in Memorial Close, under the figs the schoolchildren planted, facing the gates and the names of the dead. Afterward, people move into Montville Hall...

Image: Kgbo | CC BY-SA 4.0