They are lined along an avenue of horse chestnuts at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, bronze casts mounted on polished granite pedestals.
The politician Richard Crouch commissioned Wallace Anderson to create the first twelve busts in 1939; he pledged £1000[a] to maintain the Avenue in perpetuity.
In January 2025, the heads of Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd were removed with an angle grinder, while 18 other busts were damaged in an act of vandalism.
In 1926, the Ballarat-born politician Richard Crouch (1868–1949) began a lengthy series of donations to the city's institutions and sporting clubs.
These busts would placed in what would be renamed the Prime Ministers Avenue,[4][5] the "Horse Chestnut Walk" from the begonia house to the southern end of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens.
[4] When the Avenue was first announced, Australian humourist Lennie Lower wrote that "the gardens are a place for quiet relaxation, and it is horrible to contemplate the idea of a bust leering out of the shrubbery and frightening little children."
[4] Working at his studio in Hawthorn, Anderson extensively studied photographs, public library records and biographies to design the sculptures of those he could not meet in person;[8][11] he also sought their relatives' approval with the likeness.
[4]Bronze busts of every Prime Minister from Barton to Lyons stand on granite plinths ranged on either side of a wide path.
But time will set right these omissions, and the long avenue ahead sunnily presupposes many years of Australian national progression.
In late 1941, he was still working on the twelfth prime minister, Robert Menzies, with an empty pedestal already in place at the Avenue.
[23] They were recovered undamaged the next month, Fisher's at the George V statue on Sturt Street and Hughes' at the Ballarat Soldiers' Convalescent Depot.
[citation needed] In September 1946, Ben Chifley sat down for twenty-year-old Ballarat Arts School student Ken Palmer, who modeled Chiefly's bust for the Prime Ministers Avenue.
[32] In 1952, photographer Ernest Shea compared the Prime Ministers Avenue to "a line of skeletons sticking their heads up out of the ground.
[citation needed] The busts of Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were created by Peter Nicholson.
[citation needed] The Ballarat council had repeatedly and unsuccessfully lobbied the federal government for funding in perpetuity, and has also called for expressions of interest from sculptors.
[44] The bust of Malcolm Turnbull was also created by Klarfeld and was commissioned using funding from the City of Ballarat's Public Art Program.
This entailed the removal and subsequent theft of the heads of the busts of former Labor leaders Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd with an angle grinder and the covering of the remaining statues' nameplates with spray paint including red crosses.