A PROVISIONAL committee of eight members was elected at a meeting on Wednesday night to evaluate options to replace the Dobie’s Avenue of Honour.
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Historian Roy Trimble instigated the meeting after he started piecing together parts of Dobie’s past and is one of the committee’s members.
He said Ararat Rural City Council Mayor Gwenda Allgood was impressed with the number of people at the meeting.
“It went really well,” he said. “This is just for a small community and it only concerned a very specific issue.”
The committee will assess the viability of three different proposals after it was decided at the meeting there would be a relocated replacement to the existing avenue of honour.
Mr Trimble said there would either be a memorial, a new avenue or a combined avenue and memorial.
“The committee will investigate those option before reporting back to the larger group in due course,” he said.
“They are all ways that soldiers’ lives have been commemorated elsewhere in Victoria.”
The existing avenue has fallen into disrepair and will make way for the duplication of the Western Highway.
Mr Trimble said Western Highway Duplication Project Section 2B Team Leader Peter Cowie offered to provide assistance to the group.
“The Ararat Rural City Council have also offered the same assistance," he said.
“Gwenda Allgood and Peter were both at the meeting on Wednesday and had a chance to hear the points of view of everyone at the meeting.
“For all intensive purposes it was a really good start to the project.”
The committee was given a timeline that would see the replacement officially opened on August 6 2019 – 100 years on from the opening of the original avenue of honour at Dobie.
“Over the next month the committee will be officially set up,” Mr Trimble said.
“It will then have roughly six months to plan and prepare, four months for construction and the final two months will see preparations start for the opening ceremony."