Calls to rename Melbourne Ports after Monash
A PROPOSAL to rename the electorate of Melbourne Ports after Sir John Monash will be raised at a Liberal Party State Council meeting this month and an online petition for the name change is being launched.
The idea, proposed by Kate Ashmor, chair of the party’s Melbourne Ports Federal Electorate Conference, is to rename the electorate as Monash, in honour of its most prominent former citizen on the 150th anniversary of his birth.
Ashmor said she was “inspired” by a campaign from former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer to have Monash posthumously promoted to the rank of field marshal and have more public places named for him.
As reported in The AJN, Fischer last year released a biography of the Australian World War I icon, in which he claimed Monash had been marginalised by certain figures in the Australian political, academic and media establishment.
Born in 1865, Monash rose to the rank of lieutenant general commanding Australian forces in World War I.
In a brief to the State Council’s March 28 meeting, Ashmor will state: “Melbourne Ports is home to most of Victoria’s Jewish community, 12 per cent of the electorate’s population according to the 2011 Census. Sir John is one of Victoria’s most prominent Jews ever.”
Although his birthplace in West Melbourne and his burial site at Brighton Cemetery do not fall within the present boundaries of Melbourne Ports, Ashmor said West Melbourne was within the electorate’s original boundaries at Federation in 1901 and Brighton Cemetery remained within Melbourne Ports until a 2010 redistribution.
Ashmor told The AJN that sidelining Monash “is a historic wrong that has very disturbing elements of anti-Semitism … Now is the time, during the Centenary of Anzac, to finally right the anti-Semitic wrongs of the past, and honour Melbourne Ports’ greatest citizen – and arguably the greatest ever Australian Jew.”
Longstanding Melbourne Ports MP Michael Danby said naming an electorate after Monash “is not a new idea” , with a former Victorian upper-house seat named Monash Province, and he doubted the proposed name change would pass the Australian Electoral Commission.
“Monash is an imposing figure in Australian history, and has rightly been given the honour of having his portrait appear on our $100 note, as well as having a university, a municipality, a medical centre and even a freeway named after him. These honours, and that his state funeral was attended by almost a third of Melburnians in 1931, mark Australia’s enduring respect to his legacy,” Danby told The AJN.
PETER KOHN
Sir John Monash.
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