By LUKE VOOGT
Dedicated Waurn Ponds residents have worked tirelessly to ensure their century-old memorial remains unforgotten.
Jack Harriott and a local committee recently finished a new fence around the memorial reserve which is off Waurn Ponds Drive.
“It’s very much a local treasure,” Jack said.
“It’s just got to stay so no one can sell it and by building the fence I think we’ve achieved that.”
Geelong’s bypass has turned Waurn Ponds Drive into a road to nowhere, so few drivers encounter the reserve.
Waurn Ponds Memorial Reserve committee of management received $4000 and $2000 grants from City Hall and Bendigo Bank respectively which funded four days of work replacing the previous dilapidated wire fence.
Neighbours and children also volunteered to clean up and maintain the reserve, Jack said.
“Unless you do things for yourself in the country they don’t get done.”
The committee will put on a free lunch this Sunday to celebrate the improvements.
Jack said Korean and Vietnam veterans would attend the ceremony, beginning at 10.45am.
Geelong Military Re-enactment Group would commemorate the reserve’s re-opening with three shots from a 25-pound anti-aircraft gun.
“It makes an awful noise but the kids love it,” Jack said.
The reserve, fronting Cochranes Road, has an anti-aircraft gun and a stand of trees that have commemorated Australian service personnel for nearly a century.
The reserve replaces Waurn Ponds’ Avenue of Honour of 35 trees which were planted in July 1919 to honour 15 residents who served in World War I.
