Lemnos Square - Port Phillip

Cr Voss, Mayor of Port Phillip, announces the naming of Lemnos Square. Photo Peter Ford 2017.

Last week the Mayor of the City of Port Philip, Cr Bernadene Voss, announced the naming of the location of our Lemnos Gallipoli Memorial as Lemnos Square.
The name was formally gazetted in the Victorian Government Gazette on the 18th May 2017.
As far as we know, this is the first time that Lemnos has been gazetted as a name for a location since the 1920's when the soldiers settlement outside Shepparton in Victoria's north east was named Lemnos - and it remains so to this day. An important achievement for our generation.
The erection of our Memorial and the naming of Lemnos Square are important legacy projects - which will go some way to ensuring that the role of Lemnos in the Gallipoli campaign will not be forgotten.

Excerpt from Victorian Government Gazette

This has been the culmination of a lot of work by our Committee to re-inforce awareness of the role of Lemnos in the Gallipoli campaign and its local connection to the area where our memorial is located.
Our submission was based on our putting forward detailed evidence explaining the deep connections between Port Phillip, Lemnos and Gallipoli. Some of these links we identified are:

• The estimated nearly 5,000 diggers and nurses who volunteered in the First World War, many of which served on Lemnos as part of the Gallipoli campaign like Albert Park electrician Corporal George Finlay Knight and St Kilda's Private Cyril Leishman;
• Local nurses like Elwood's Nurse Clarice Daley and Potter who were among the 37 Victorian nurses who served with the 3rd Australian General Hospital on Lemnos in 1915 - and among the 30 nurses who departed on the RMS Mooltan from nearby Princes Pier;
• To the soldiers who came to Lemnos' Anzac camp at Sarpi (modern day Kalithea) to rest after the bitter months of fighting and privation the peninsula like Brigadier John Monash (the commander of the camp) and Corporal Albert Jacka VC (who would survive the war and become a local Mayor in Port Phillip);
• And many of these diggers and nurses wandered Lemnos during periods of leave, meeting the locals and enjoying their hospitality, like Brigadier John Monash and many others;
• The many local diggers who remain on Lemnos to this day in its Commonwealth War Cemeteries at East Mudros and Portianos having paid the ultimate sacrifice for their service - like Corporal Knight, Private Leishman and South Melbourne's Driver Ralph Berryman - to name a few; and,
• And finally, but by no means least, Port Phillip's Princes Pier was the arrival port for many of the thousands of Greek migrants - including those from Lemnos - who made their new lives in  Australia, transforming Melbourne into the largest Hellenic heritage city outside of Greece.

These were also the reasons that we had submitted in support of our original proposal to locate our Lemnos Gallipoli Memorial in Melbourne's bayside suburb of Port Phillip.
To read our submission in support of the naming of Lemnos Square and to learn more about the connection between Lemnos, Gallipoli and Port Phillip, click here.
For more on the announcement, click here.
We look forward to the possibility of a reciprocal naming on Lemnos.

Jim Claven
Secretary
Lemnos Gallipoli Commemorative Committee