Victor Denton War Memorial

Queensland’s first known World War I memorial doesn’t stand in a public park or at a street intersection, it’s in a small Darling Downs’ cemetery. And unlike the others, it is in memory of one man.

Residents from the farming district of Nobby wanted to honour 20-year-old stockman Private Victor Denton who enlisted with the 2nd Light Horse Regiment just weeks after Australia announced it was at war in 1914. He died of battle wounds in June 1915 on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey and was buried there. This memorial stands as a sign of the spontaneous, highly visible grief that gripped the community and the nation.

The memorial is located within the Denton family plot, alongside the grave of Victor’s parents, in Nobby Cemetery.

Toowoomba monumental masons Bruce Brothers created the concrete and stone memorial, the broken column symbolising a life cut short. It was unveiled November 1915 during a recruitment march from Warwick to Brisbane, by a group labelled the ‘Dungarees’. The march’s participants drew large crowds in every town.