The Australian Soldier Park

The story

The Australian Soldier Park is a garden in Neighborhood Yod-Alef in Beersheba, and it commemorates the Australian soldiers who charged the city in the Battle of Beersheba in the First World War. The garden was dedicated in 2008, extends over a wide area, and is fenced and guarded, with fixed opening hours and a staff that maintains it. In its eastern corner stands “the Australian horseman sculpture”: a figurative bronze sculpture of a horseman riding a charging horse, designed by the Australian sculptor Peter Corlett, and around it plaques with explanations about the battle. The garden has a picnic corner, ornamental corners, public toilets and a large play area with shading systems. Most of the play area is accessible to children who use wheelchairs, and this was done by design and not by chance: it has slides some of which can be climbed to by a ramp, a carousel with seating benches beside safe places for a wheelchair, swings and hammocks of many kinds, and a maze; and the disabled parking is inside the garden itself, so that people who move with difficulty will not have to cross it on foot. More than three million dollars were invested in the building of the park, part of it from the Australian Pratt Foundation and from the Beersheba Foundation. It is one of three places in the city that tell of that same day in October 1917, alongside the ANZAC Memorial Centre and the British military cemetery.

• 1917
• Commemoration
• Public art
• Beersheba