Photos: Supplied.
BY HARVEY SHORE
In 1921, the Manly-Lota RSL created a war memorial in Manly’s Richard Russell Park. Its centrepiece was an Australian soldier, with head lowered and rifle reversed in the traditional symbol of mourning.
This statue was carved from Carrara marble imported from Italy – the same marble favoured by Michelangelo. The Manly statue was modelled on a real Aussie digger, Private William (Bill) Dodd, who served in the First World War and returned to live in the Wynnum-Manly area. His relatives still live locally.
The statue of Private Dodd stood silently over Manly-Lota RSL memorial services for nearly 70 years – until 1990, when a pair of vandals chained it to their car and pulled it off its plinth. Police arrested the culprits, but the statue was smashed into pieces.
No one knew what happened to the broken statue after that. The plinth stood empty for years, until a concrete replica of Private Dodd was commissioned in 2007 by Manly Lota RSL and installed on the Manly war memorial in its place. It stands there to this day.
Several years ago, Iona College old boy Ted Barber and several other colleagues, all members of Manly-Lota RSL, began planning a war memorial at Iona. Ted joined Michael Muir, Manly-Lota RSL president at the time, in a search for the original vandalised marble statue, rumoured to still exist somewhere.
After a long and complicated hunt, they found it lying forgotten on a pallet in a council yard in Lota. It was shattered, with parts missing, but another Iona old boy, Daniel Gill, a stonemason, agreed to repair it. Obtaining marble from the original quarry in Italy, Daniel restored the old statue to its former glory.
Remarkably, and to everyone’s credit, at 11am on November 11, 2025, Private Bill Dodd will stand proud over two local Remembrance Day gatherings simultaneously – the Manly-Lota RSL ceremony in Richard Russell Park, and the new memorial, to be unveiled at Iona College.
