[1] The Manly War Memorial was unveiled by Walter Henry Barnes, Member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly, on 5 March 1921.

The memorial, originally of Helidon brown freestone on a base of Enoggera granite, with a statue of Carrara marble, honours the 16 local men who fell during the First World War.

From the late 1890s the area was designated as a water reserve and eventually formed part of the Manly Dam, filled in some time after 1908.

Many memorials honour all who served from a locality, not just the dead, providing valuable evidence of community involvement in the war.

[1] Australian war memorials are also valuable evidence of imperial and national loyalties, at the time, not seen as conflicting; the skills of local stonemasons, metalworkers and architects; and of popular taste.

[1] Many of the First World War monuments have been updated to record local involvement in later conflicts, and some have fallen victim to unsympathetic re-location and repair.

It was the most popular choice of communities responsible for erecting the memorials, embodying the ANZAC spirit and representing the qualities of the ideal Australian: loyalty, courage, youth, innocence and masculinity.

The digger was a phenomenon peculiar to Queensland, perhaps due to the fact that other states had followed Britain's lead and established Advisory Boards made up of architects and artists, prior to the erection of war memorials.

It sits in a constructed oval-shaped amphitheatre within the park which comprises a formal arrangement of paths, garden seats, hedges and mature trees.

The front face displays a marble plaque with the leaded names of the local men who fell in the First World War and the word MANLY is incised on the lower step.

The western face also displays a marble plaque with the leaded names of the local men who fell in the Second World War.

War Memorials are important in demonstrating the pattern of Queensland's history as they are representative of a recurrent theme that involved most communities throughout the state.