Commando News Magazine edition 8 2021

proclaimed the largest sculptures ‘since the days of the
Ancient Egyptians.’ Shrine construction materials were
exalted: 6,000 tons of silver Tynong granite; Redesdale
and Hawkesbury freestone; columns of black marble
from Buchan; 124 tons of steel; 26,000 bags of cement;
two-and-ahalf million Brunswick bricks; bronze cases
for 42 parchment Books of Remembrance listing all
Victorians who served overseas in the war.
Sir John Monash became one of our first tour
guides: hosting schoolteachers, judges and former
army nurses over the worksite. On Anzac Day 1930,
12,000 people swarmed over the unfinished
monument. The perimeter fence was gradually
dismantled and the site opened up to the public each
Tuesday and Sunday afternoon. This left it prey to
vandals and protesters, who broke in and defaced
bronze work and threw hollow potatoes filled with
grease at the buttress sculpture ‘Patriotism’. The
damaged granite had to be chipped off with a
pneumatic drill, and the ‘degenerate’ vandal got a year
in gaol on bread-and-water.
The final form of the Shrine was slowly resolving
above the city. A giant steam crane lifted stone blocks
to the upper galleries and the top of the dome was
reached in November 1931. Vaughan boasted there’d
only been one serious accident (a broken leg), the only
time lost was due to the Timber Strike and more than
100 men had been kept in work. But the Depression
was deepening. State governments began handing out
sustenance payments to the jobless: up to one pound
a week, plus two shillings per child (basic wage then
was £5 a week). The ‘Susso’ was augmented with ‘dole
tickets,’ redeemable for groceries in shops or bags of
rations from welfare agencies.
The Shrine stressed its aim ‘to employ as many
returned soldiers as we can.’ Even the Committee’s
typist—their only female employee—was a bona fide
daughter of a veteran. But the press challenged the
true ratio of diggers to workers, once claiming it was as
low as 24 per cent. Unions accused the Shrine ‘of
acquiring quite a cosmopolitan tinge’ with the
extraordinary disclosure that six Italians were being
employed at the expense of out-of-work Australians.
Vaughan countered that no Melbourne hardstone
mason had the skills needed to flute the Doric columns
and besides, 30 Australian masons were working the
freestone in the Sanctuary. And one
Italian, Pietro Porcelli, was sculpting the
frieze panels for the inner Shrine, though
he was later deposed by their designer
Lyndon Dadswell.
August Rietman in his studio c 1920s
Image courtesy of the Rietman family
and CMKS at Box Cottage Ormond
August Rietman was another foreign
artisan employed on contract work at the
Shrine. The Swiss monumental mason and
his wife Frieda had come to Australia in
1914 and settled in Bentleigh.
Specialising in pressedcement sculpture,
he carved dozens of ‘diggers’ for country
towns in the memorial boom after the
war. Shrine chief sculptor Paul Montford
wanted him to complete the Sanctuary
friezes but Rietman declined, fearing his
surname and German wife would stir
controversy. instead, he created the
beautiful streetlamp standards for the
pathways around the Shrine, and the
Rietman family business continues today.
COMMANDO ~ The Magazine of the Australian Commando Association ~ Edition 8 I 2021 39