Remembrance Day Services Set For Friday Balmain’s Loyalty Square will again fall silent at 11am this Friday to remember the fallen from all wars. Council will partner with the Balmain-Rozelle RSL to hold the 2016 Remembrance Day Ceremony from 11am to 12noon at what is one of the earliest WW1 memorials built in Australia. Located on the corner of Beattie Street and Darling Street in Balmain, the memorial drinking fountain at Loyalty Square features the words ‘Peace, Honour, Empire, Liberty’. It records the names of 38 Balmain men who lost their lives at Gallipoli and was designed by a soldier from Balmain. At the time of the memorial’s unveiling, Balmain was a working-class suburb whose main industry came from its busy docks. At the outbreak of World War I, nearly all of the local men eligible to enlist did so and many were workers from the docks. Close to 5000 men and women from the suburbs of Annandale, Balmain, Birchgrove, Leichhardt, Lilyfield and Rozelle enlisted their services for World War One. Around 4,500 enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force – the AIF – with a further 500 in the Royal Australian Air Force and Navy, and serving as Nurses and Medical Staff. The memorial initially commemorated the local men who had perished in the Dardanelles campaign that began in 1915. Since then, the memorial has evolved, as later wars have added new names to the lists of the deceased and the campaigns in which they took part; World War II, the Vietnam War and, more recently, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Former Leichhardt Mayor Darcy Byrne will speak on behalf of Council at the Loyalty Square ceremony on Friday. In a separate ceremony at 3pm for Remembrance Day, Inner West Council administrator Richard Pearson will officially unveil a new World War Two memorial in Marrickville Park.
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