The Yanchep RSL Memorial Wall
A place for plaques, a place to reflect, and a place built by the community it now serves.
Project Overview
Every Anzac Day and Remembrance Day, hundreds of people gather outside The Yanchep Inn to pay their respects. For years, they gathered around a rockery. There was nowhere for the community to remember the local men and women who served, and nowhere for their families to sit with a name and a memory.
Kinetic Landscaping worked with the Yanchep RSL Sub-Branch and Yanchep National Park to replace that rockery with a permanent memorial wall: a place for plaques, a place to reflect, and a place built by the community it now serves.
The Client Brief
The rockery around the water feature outside The Yanchep Inn had needed an upgrade for years. It sat in the town’s most visited gathering spot, but it gave the RSL and the wider Yanchep community nothing to gather around.
Bel had a personal reason to want this fixed. Her own grandparents were part of the local RSL, and she knew what a memorial wall would mean to families like hers. In 2020, Kinetic brought the idea to the Yanchep RSL Sub-Branch and Yanchep National Park: pull out the rockery, build a wall where past members could be properly remembered. Both organisations backed it immediately.
The Challenges
- A high-traffic, highly visible public site that needed to keep working as a gathering place throughout construction
- Two separate stakeholders, the RSL Sub-Branch and Yanchep National Park, to coordinate on a permanent, community-facing structure
- Donated materials and plants to source from three different local suppliers rather than one trade account
- A year-long Covid delay that pushed the build from its original 2020 target into 2021, against a fixed, symbolic deadline: Remembrance Day
Scope of Works
Community partnerships
Kinetic brought three local businesses into the project. Benara Nurseries donated the Spirit of the Anzac Grevillea for planting along the wall. Limestone Building Block Company, the local quarry, donated the limestone blocks the wall is built from. Yanchep Garden Centre donated the reticulation parts needed to get the new plantings established.
Demolition and construction
The existing rockery around the water feature was removed and replaced with a limestone memorial wall, built to hold plaques and built to last.
Planting and reticulation
Kinetic installed the donated reticulation to give the new Grevilleas the best start, then planted them along the finished wall.
Timeline & Workflow
Planning started in 2020. Covid pushed the build back a full year, so Kinetic and the RSL retargeted completion for November 2021, in time for Remembrance Day. The wall was finished on schedule, and a dedication ceremony marked the occasion, led by local pastor Reverend Taylor, with members of the RSL and the Yanchep community in attendance.
The Transformation
The rockery outside The Yanchep Inn is now a memorial wall carrying plaques for local RSL members, past and present. Since 2021, more families have added plaques of their own, and the wall has become somewhere people sit, not just walk past.
Bel brought her Nan to the dedication. Her Pop, married to her Nan for nearly 70 years, had passed away the year before. It was a personal project before it was a professional one, and that’s a large part of why it matters as much as it does.
Why This Project Stands Out
Kinetic proposed this project. Nobody asked for it. A gap existed in a public space Yanchep passes every day, and a Kinetic team member had a personal reason to close it.
- Two stakeholders and three donor businesses brought to the table instead of a single quoted job
- Built to a fixed, symbolic deadline, Remembrance Day, through a year-long disruption
- A structure designed to keep growing: new plaques are still being added years later
- A project where the personal reason and the professional job were the same thing
Planning a community or memorial landscaping project?
If your organisation has a space that could hold more meaning than it currently does, Kinetic Landscaping can help you work out what it could become.
Kinetic Landscaping delivers landscape construction across Perth’s northern suburbs, from private gardens to public and community spaces. If you’d like to talk about your site, reach out to the team.