On the Seventh Memorial: The Gun, Once Ours, Now Theirs

Anyone walking the College grounds with even casual attention will encounter our war memorials. There are six of them. They are: War Memorial Oval (the No. 1 Oval), the Mothers' Memorial Pavilion (the Grandstand), the WW1 Pylons, the WW2 Steps, the War Memorial Chapel, and the memorial in the Junior School. Each is treated, by the school and by the community, with the seriousness it deserves.

There used to be a seventh.

On a date in 1921, in a ceremony of the kind that schools held often in the years immediately after the Great War, the College unveiled a captured German machine gun. It was set on a low stone plinth, near the front lawn. It was a memorial. It was, in the manner of the period, both a memorial and an object — a real machine gun, captured from a real war, presented to the school as recognition of the service of Old Boys who had not come home.

It sat there for two decades.

At some point during the 1940s, the Australian Government repossessed it.

The records, in the way of records, do not say very much about the repossession. The College's view, then and now, is that the gun was reclaimed by the Commonwealth in the context of the Second World War, in line with policies of the period concerning serviceable arms held privately or institutionally. We can confirm only that the gun was unveiled in 1921, that it sat on the plinth for some twenty years, and that at some point during the 1940s the gun went away, and the gun did not come back.

Six memorials remain. They are well-cared-for, frequently visited, and the subject of considerable institutional effort, particularly around Anzac Day. The seventh — the gun — is, by every measure available to the College, gone.

What remains of it is the plinth, which still sits on the lawn near the front of the school, weathered now, mowed around carefully by the grounds staff, and bearing no plaque, because the original plaque went with the gun. Visitors arriving via the Pacific Highway gate sometimes pause at it. The plinth does not announce itself. It is, however, the seventh memorial, and the only one that is no longer there.

We are an Anglican school, and we are accustomed to the kind of memorial that has its object firmly in place. The seventh is a different kind of memorial. It memorialises, on the plinth itself, the men whose service prompted the gift. It memorialises, by the absence above the plinth, the gift itself — a real machine gun that was, for two decades, on our front lawn, and was then, by the same Government in whose service those men had been killed, taken away.

The College does not, the College has never, expressed any institutional opinion on the repossession. The Archives have a copy of one (1) photograph of the gun, taken at the unveiling. It is in a folder. The folder is in a drawer. The drawer is, contrary to school folklore, not locked.

If you ask, we will show you.