Lorne Victoria Australia
7th November 2025
Honouring Our Past
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘honour’ [Australian and UK spelling] or ‘honor’ [US spelling] as signifying:
… Great respect, esteem, or reverence received, gained, or enjoyed by a person or thing; glory, renown, fame; reputation, good name.
Honour is a noble word, and one that is nearly as old as time itself. Indeed, the fourth commandment as found in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy reads: “Honour your father and your mother” and means “to treat them with respect, value, and esteem, even if you disagree with them”.
In the age of G.O.A.T. [Greatest Of All Time] culture—a term that originated in the sports world but, in the digital age, has started to infect an increasingly wide range of pursuits—other descriptive terms like ‘hero’, ‘legend’, ‘icon’, and ‘champion’ have been so tossed around that their meanings have become debased and only hold until the next GOAT comes along.
While an American author and podcaster, Todd Kashdan wrote in a 2025 essay titled “Honor: An Outdated Virtue” [https://tinyurl.com/4pazcz3j] that “… honour culture is a fascinating relic, an evolutionary glitch that keeps persisting even though modern life has largely outgrown it”, I could not disagree more.
Perhaps Kashdan had eaten something that caused the gripes! Maybe he is just mean-spirited after rising from the wrong side of the bed. But contrary to his view, I think ‘honour’ is a gentle and wise word that is far from out-of-date … indeed, it is one of the few that still signifies unchallengeable respect and reverence. Long may that be so.
Why, then, this long preamble? Well, plans are well afoot—courtesy of the Lorne P1-12 College, to return honour to Lorne and revive the Avenue of Honour that once traversed the current Stribling Reserve. But don’t worry, Dolphins, you won’t have to dodge and weave through a plantation of trees … the kids have selected a new site that will make the town proud.
While similar concepts of planting trees for remembrance exist elsewhere, the sheer scale of and specific history attached to the Avenues of Honour are uniquely Australian. Frequently seen lining the main thoroughfares in rural and regional towns and cities, they are distinctive symbols of civic pride, reverence, and remembrance, with each tree representing a person from that town who served in World War I. Many still bear a plaque with the name of the individual serviceman they commemorate, and there is great local civic pride in maintaining the trees and their markers.
The tradition originated in Victoria’s Goldfields as an egalitarian way to honour our World War I servicemen, but quickly spread across all states and territories to become an integral part of our Australian culture [https://tinyurl.com/2s3py4rx]. On ANZAC Day, we march and remember—but usually on that day alone. However, as we drive [often daily] down an avenue of memorial trees that touch overhead in a tunnel of green, we also remember—but the reminder is constant and tangible.
While most living memorials are actual avenues, some are individual trees. Several ‘lone pine’ plantings commemorate the solitary tree on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which marked the site of the Battle of Lone Pine in August 1915, while Gallipoli oaks grown from acorns brought home by survivors, one-sided rows of trees, memorial copses, and groves are all carefully curated.
One remarkable site that documents every known memorial avenue can be browsed at https://avenuesofhonour.org/ and features some intriguing interactive maps that show the extraordinary impact the Avenue of Honour concept exerted in regional Australia.
Those who now desecrate our major cities with their protests would do well to drive Ballarat’s extraordinary 22-kilometre Avenue of Honour with its 3912 trees—or visit any of the other 547 known avenues across Australia … it might prove a sobering experience. Victoria alone has more than 300 avenues across the state.
Avenues also commemorate the other wars in which Australians have fought and died. These include Victor Harbour [SA] and Mickleham [Vic]—among others—who honour our WWII veterans; Hindmarsh [SA] and Samford [Q], which commemorate those who fought in the Korean conflict; while closer to home, North Geelong honours our Vietnam veterans with a cenotaph and a named avenue of native gums along Melbourne Road.
Lorne established its own WWI Avenue of Honour on 14/10/1919 to commemorate WW1. An avenue of red gum trees, each marked with a metal plaque commemorating a local who served, was planted diagonally across ‘Library Paddock’ and led down to a cenotaph on the school corner. In October 1921, the Birregurra Times reported that ‘… the fifty red flowering gums were looking healthy, and the brass plates commemorating the Lorne men who made the supreme sacrifice were in position’.
Later, when the football ground was relocated from the foreshore to its current site at Stribling Reserve, the sacrifice of the trees was keenly debated by the town. While the cenotaph was relocated to its current position on Mountjoy Parade, the trees and plaques were removed. Sadly, the plates have been lost, but the names are all known and are now fuelling a new project of discovery for the kids at the school.
In 2025, one of the school’s teachers, Cheri Osta, initiated a project to re-establish the Avenue of Honour on the school grounds. The “Lost Lorne Avenue of Honour Project” will enable students to remember the struggles of those who served—many of whom were the forebears of our current student body—and to embed the memory of their sacrifice for future generations in a tangible, practical way. It is hoped that the planting will help reconnect the school community with its history and, through researching their stories, help our kids better understand the human cost of war.
Avenue of Honour at Smith St Lorne P-12 College – Work in Progress
New name plates will be designed that feature an embedded QR code. This will allow the individual stories of each serviceman to be told. By researching the lives of each serviceman as part of their history, environmental science and design studies, the students will be able to explore how war shaped the health and well-being of the town the men went to war to preserve.
The Lost Lorne Avenue of Honour Project plans to:
- restore Lorne’s lost memorial and return it to its rightful place at the heart of Lorne’s history,
- provide a focus for remembrance, reflection, and pride, and
- become a living classroom for our youth.
Students, community members, the RSL, and local business partners are uniting to: re-establish the avenue with native plantings, build a sandstone commemorative seat [the stone is on site on Smith Street], and design interpretive signage that shares the stories of each soldier.
Todd Kashdan was dead wrong. Honour is not ‘a fascinating relic’ and has not ‘outgrown its relevance to modern society’. Rather, it is a keystone ‘must have’ for any who seek to know who Australians are. Our Avenues of Honour attest to it.
John Agar
Feature Writer
Additional sources: Doug Stirling’s ‘Lorne, a living history’, and Cheri Osta, Lorne School 2025
A Word from the Chair
Hello
Well, it looks like Mother Nature listened to my request (with one ear at least!) and gave us a long-awaited taste of summer weather over the long weekend, which brought Lorne to life, with many visitors and locals out and about. How good was it to see crowds on the beach for the first time since Easter, although I am sure the water temperature would have taken their breath away! It was also great to see all our hospitality venues full to capacity as they were able to utilise their outdoor areas.
Welcome to our newest retail outlet, Sage and Clare, which offers a wide array of innovative and eye-catching homewares and gifts. I am sure they will be warmly welcomed by the Lorne community and we wish them every success.
With all the talk of “net zero”, renewables and power prices, the focus has turned to artificial intelligence and the extraordinary amount of power required to drive it, to such an extent that the big tech companies in the US are now buying defunct power stations and re-activating them. It is reported that AI now consumes more than 20% of the power supply in Ireland. Paddy was heard to say, “Thank God there is still 80% left for real intelligence!” Sorry.
Many of you will have received your rate instalment notices recently, which were accompanied by some very important information about bushfire preparedness. While the threat may seem far away after some soaking rains, we know that things can and will change quickly and now is the time to prepare.
What is concerning about our rates is the disproportionate increase, largely attributable to creeping levies imposed by the State Government but collected (by stealth?) through the council rates system. This year our rates increased by 29.6%, which included the new Emergency Services Volunteer Fund Levy (ESVF), formerly the Fire Services Property Levy (FSPL), and the Environment Protection Authority Levy (EPAL). The ESVF (FSPL) has increased by 89% over the last year and 274% over the last 2 years. The EPAL has risen by 27.8% over the last year and 97.4% over the last 5 years. I raise these issues not to whinge, as we are grateful that we own our home, but to highlight that in addition to the much- maligned land tax increase, there are other (hidden) State Government imposts which are seriously impacting on housing affordability for homeowners, rental property providers and tenants. And then there is the mooted “spare bedroom tax”, but more about that next week.
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A final reminder about our special community meeting regarding the redevelopment of the Point Grey Co-op building which is being held this Sunday, November 9 at Stribling Reserve Pavilion at 10.30am. We have already received over 100 registrations, but all are welcome to come and send a resounding message to GORCAPA that the ill-considered and disrespectful plans for this precious community asset are unacceptable to our community. Please see further information and register here – info@committeeforlorne.org.au.
Cheers
John Higgins
Chairman, Committee for Lorne
