By Mikayla van Loon
Hundreds of volunteer hours and thousands of knitted poppies later, a special commemorative Anzac Day display has been installed in Lilydale.
The group of Creative Community Knitters, led by Sharon Chuck, once again put a tremendous amount of effort into designing and knitting poppies for the bigger than ever before display.
Totaling 14,075 poppies, all handmade, Ms Chuck said “the ladies have done an incredible job”.
This year, the design features a full size horse, soldiers, a nurse, a line of poppies leading to the memorial, as well as the Lest We Forget banner which were installed on Main Street on Saturday 19 April by a team of volunteers from the Rotary Club, Township Group and CFA.
Marking the 110th year of the Gallipoli landing, the scale of the display matches the impact of the war and tells the stories of those who returned.
“It’s about people in our town and how they came back from war and contributed to making the town as it is,” Ms Chuck said.
“The soldier that’s with the horse, his parents owned the general store in Lilydale. He came back to take over the running of the general store. So that was his story.
The (other) soldier came back and he went to Silvan and took up one of the allotments that the government was giving. He started strawberry plants there. Each person has their own story.
“The nurse came back and she raised her family. She’s buried over at the Lilydale cemetery. Everybody that’s involved in it, they all have a part of the town, a little part in our town, and I think that’s important, that we recognise these wonderful people for what they did.”
With the help of the Mooroolbark Men’s Shed this year, some very lifelike rifles were created and crafted to accompany the soldiers.
“They have done the most incredible job. In fact, they’re too real. They’ve worked on these for 12 months now,” Ms Chuck said.
The help also spread further with the leader of the Melbourne Football Club cheer squad lending a hand after hearing of the project and Ms Chuck’s worries about sourcing a full size horse cut out.
A couple of days after it was mentioned to him, Ms Chuck opened her door to find just that waiting for her.
“We are very, very lucky the amount of people who have come aboard…everyone’s been magic, and they’ve all become very enthusiastic about it.”
Like every year, Ms Chuck is usually asked ‘what’s next’ but after such a large effort of time and knitting, she said she’ll just have to wait and see about next year’s design.
“I just need to have a break and restart rethinking. But usually it happens that somebody tells me a story, or I hear a story about somebody local, and then all of a sudden I think, ‘Oh, that was good. I could do something with that’.”
