Ex Prisoner of War Memorial

The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial was dedicated on Friday, 6 February 2004. It is located on the southern approaches to the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, on Wendouree Parade and adjacent to Lake Wendouree.

Now recognised nationally as the official National Prisoner of War Memorial, the memorial honours more than 35,000 Australians who were held prisoner during the Boer War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War. It is a place of national honour, remembrance and healing for all Australians. The memorial takes visitors on a journey to a different time and place, where heroism, sacrifice and mateship were the defining characteristics of the prisoners of war.

Between the 1950s and 1990s surviving prisoners of war from the Ballarat region met regularly and various plans for the establishment of a focal point for commemoration were periodically discussed. Throughout that time the Australian Federal Government had given periodic undertakings that a permanent monument would be eventually built in Canberra (the national capital). By the early 1980s, the Ballarat City Council granted a parcel of land adjacent to the city gardens to allow local veterans a place to establish a permanent focal point for the Ballarat POWs. By the mid-1990s the Australian Federal Government still had no plan for a permanent monument to be established in Canberra, thus the surviving POWs in Ballarat were prompted into action and began planning the building of a permanent memorial in their city to be largely privately funded and established with minimum government assistance.

With significant support from the Ballarat branch of the Returned and Services League (RSL) of Australia, a local sculptor, Peter Blizzard, was commissioned to design a concept for the memorial. The vision provided by the sculptor was for a monument far greater in scale and scope than that originally envisaged by the veterans. However, support for a significantly larger monument that would commemorate all Australian POWs was immediate. Funding was provided through lotteries, private donations, benevolent organisations (most notably Tattersall's), the City of Ballarat, local businesses, and finally the Federal and Victorian State Governments. Work commenced on the construction of the memorial in early 2003 with much of the labour and materials donated or provided at cost.

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