Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, 15 September 1930

Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, 15 September 1930

Charles Bruce Dellit (1898–1942)
Watercolour and pencil on wove (machine-made) paper
XV1 / Mon War / 1

Fundraising for the proposed Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park started on the first anniversary of the landing of Australian troops at Gallipoli (25 April 1915). Finally in 1929 Parliament agreed to allow a Memorial to be built in Hyde Park. Following a design competition attracting 117 entries, a young Sydney architect C Bruce Dellit won with a ‘contemporary’ Art Deco style – ‘I wanted to get right away from the classical tradition’. He engaged the sculptor Rayner Hoff to create the statues and bas-reliefs for the monument. It opened to the public in 1934.

Dellit’s achievement was to adapt a style becoming familiar in buildings designed for commerce and entertainment to the special purposes of commemoration.


Bas-relief, or low relief, is a sculptural technique referring to a projecting image with a shallow overall depth. For example, images and text on coins are in bas-relief.


Built of Bathurst granite, with a striking, ‘stepped’ silhouette, it has been claimed as Australia’s finest example of monumental Art Deco architecture.

Australian Dictionary of Biography

British subjects in Australia and Australians were invited to design a commemorative building which would cost no more than £75 000, the sum now available, including interest, from the appeals of 1916–19.


The Memorial was to be built entirely out of voluntary subscriptions.


The term Art Deco was derived from a shortening of the title of the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts held in Paris in 1925.


The stepped roof of Dellit’s Anzac Memorial recalls the Mesopotamian ziggurat, a form outside the classical canon.


Mr Dellit’s architecture trends along modern lines, and for his achievements in this direction he merits great praise …

Decoration and Glass, 1 July 1935, p 40