Charleville already had a history when the war came for it. The Warrego Pastoral District was proclaimed in 1864 as sheep men pushed up from New South Wales, and the town was gazetted in 1868, surveyed by William Alcock Tully on a generous grid, its streets ruled wide enough for a bullock train to turn. By 1880 it was a prospering halt on the stock routes; the railway reached it in 1888 and Cobb and Co arrived soon after. It was a confident inland town, grown on wool and distance. Then, between 1914 and 1918, it sent its young men to a war on the other side of the earth, and 310 of them served. Forty did not come back.

It is hard now to grasp how new this grief was. Australia had almost no civic monuments before the First World War; the memorials raised in its aftermath became the young nation's first. The scale of loss demanded them. A country of fewer than five million people lost some 60,000 dead, roughly one in seven of all who served, a wound no earlier or later war has matched. Even before the fighting ended, memorials rose across the country as a spontaneous, public expression of mourning. They were treated as sacred as graves, because for most families they were the only graves there would ever be. Charleville's monument is part of that vast, sorrowing answer, repeated in town after town across the continent.

Australian memorials carry an unusual distinction: they honour not only the dead, but everyone who served. The first great Australian army was made up entirely of volunteers, and the towns were proud of it, listing all who went, not merely those who fell. Charleville's monument follows this custom. Its Italian marble pillar bears the leaded names of those who served, with the front panel reserved for the forty fallen, the place of honour given to the dead. Carved shields at the top of each face bear the stylised letters AIF, the Australian Imperial Force. Around the sandstone base, plaques record the conflicts that came before and after: the Boer War that preceded this one, and the later wars that this one, so terribly, did not end. For the families of Charleville, this was where a son's name could be read aloud and a grief could be given a place to stand.

The monument was a deliberate act of craft, not a kit ordered from a catalogue. It is attributed to the Ipswich architect George Brockwell Gill, an Englishman who emigrated in 1886, took over his employer's practice, and rose to lead the Queensland Institute of Architects; the design closely echoes his memorial at Esk, the only other one of its kind known in the state. The marble itself was worked far away, in Toowoomba, by the well-known monumental masons R C Ziegler and Son, who raised memorials across south-western Queensland, then transported the finished monument the long, dry distance west to Charleville. The Governor of Queensland, Sir Matthew Nathan, unveiled it before the town and district. A cast-iron picket fence, its finials shaped like the fleur-de-lis, was added in the years that followed. A century on, the monument still stands almost twenty-three feet from the ground, the focal point of the town's remembrance, an empty tomb that has never been allowed to fall silent.