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The Canberra Times
The Canberra Times
Steve Evans

How to move six tonnes of honoured stone in a morning

At just over six tonnes, moving the Stone of Remembrance is not a job for your ordinary removalist.

Conveying it 50 metres from its temporary site on the side of the Australian War Memorial back to its honoured place looking down Anzac Parade took two giant German cranes, one capable of lifting 60 tonnes and the other able to lift 130 tonnes.

But the job was done.

The Stone of Remembrance is the focus of the nation's big commemorations, but it's been side-lined while the War Memorial has been transformed at a cost of $550 million.

In 2021, it was moved to make way for the construction so its return is a milestone in the project.

"It will once again be at the very heart of remembrance in Australia," the War Memorial's Director, Matt Anderson, said.

It means that future ceremonies will revert to what they were before the rebuilding and before the pandemic.

"Following the large crowds who attended the memorial on Anzac Day in 2024, we are delighted the Anzac Day Dawn Service and Veterans March will both occur on the Parade Ground from 2025," Mr Anderson said.

The first ceremony at the relocated stone will be on June 6 when a lone piper will play a single tune, joining others around the world commemorating the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France to begin the final phase of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The current Stone of Remembrance was only installed in 1962.

The gang who moved the stone. (Left to right) Kris Krawczyk, Michael Mcgivney, Nathan Garner, Bryan Howland, Mitchell Dare and Kassandra Hobbs. Picture by Steve Evans

Before that, there was some sort of replica. The War Memorial was opened in 1941 in the depths of the Second World War, and for one of the first Remembrance Days after victory in 1945, a wooden effort with a stone veneer was used.

War Memorial historian Craig Tibbitts thinks it may have been because of the austerity of the time. That replica is now lost and Mr Tibbitts is keen to know what happened to it.

It was replaced in 1962, when the War Memorial had a proper, marble effort, quarried in South Australia.

The original idea for a Stone of Remembrance came out of the First World War when the Imperial War Graves Commission decided there should be such a place of remembering the dead in the endless cemeteries of France and Flanders.

It was decreed that the stone and its inscription should be non-religious - "Their name liveth for evermore" - and the stone at the Australian War Memorial mirrors the thought and the design of those poignant monuments across the battlefields of the war to end all wars.

The relocation at the Memorial needed two cranes of different capacities. So that the parade ground wasn't damaged, the unloading crane had to be further away from the final setting-down position than the crane from the pick-up place - and a wider working radius meant a higher capacity.

The movers were pleased.

"This stone is a very iconic piece here at the War Memorial and we are honoured at Capital Cranes to be involved in the relocation," the company's general manager Bryan Howland said.

"I don't see that there were any tricky bits. The guys that were on this job are extremely great at what they do, and I had full faith in their ability to relocate the stone safely.

"I'm just glad it's here, in position where they want it."

Technical note: the cranes were a 60-ton Liebherr LTM1060-3.1 All-Terrain crane equipped with VarioBase technology and a 130-ton Liebherr LTM1130-5.1 All-Terrain Crane, configured as a 70-ton crane and equipped with VarioBase technology.

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