First Anzac Day parade in Australia on October 13, 1915, in Adelaide as the substitute for Eight Hours Day celebrations
The first Anzac Day parade, the name given to the usual Eight Hours Day public holiday parade, progressing along King William Street, Adelaide city, in October 1915.
Australia’s first Anzac Day parade and observance was in Adelaide on October 13, 1915.
This came from the South Australian Trades Hall union movement deciding to devote its celebrated Eight Hours Day (later Labor Day) public holiday in 1915 to a fundraising venture for World War I wounded soldiers and their families.
Adelaide filmmaker Ash Starkey’s film documentary The First ANZAC Day detailed how South Australians had already created Anzac Day firsts earlier in 1915. Arthur Blackburn and Philip Robin, soldiers from South Australia’s 10th Battalion, AIF (Australian Imperial Force), were the only ones to reach their objective (Scrubby Knoll) on the April 25 first day of landing at Gallipoli in the Dardenelles. Blackburn and Robin saw many Turkish soldiers gathering on the other side of the hill and, without other troops nearby to support them, they had to return. No other Australian soldier advanced as far as they did for the rest of the campaign.
South Australia created another Anzac observance first with the Gallipoli Wattle Grove memorial, in Adelaide city’s south parklands. First proposed by another Adelaide first, the Wattle Day League (a nationalistic group favouring compulsory military training), the memorial was unveiled on September 7, 1915. The memorial included an obelisk created earlier in the war with an inscription that referred to “Australasian” soldiers who fought in the Dardanelles offense. The Wattle Grove memorial became a location where mothers and widows of the young fallen soldiers could place wreaths and mourn the loss of sons and husbands.
The first Anzac Day parade in October 1915 was followed by a fair at Adelaide Oval to raise funds. To attract patrons, shops were set up as well as entertainment. The major attraction was the crashing of two trams on rails that exploded and burst into flame on impact. The spectacle was widely publicised and billed as “American-style entertainment”.
