Summary

One of 13 fundraising badges originally attached to a blue velvet ribbon. The badges all date from the World War I era, 1914-1919. They were purchased or collected by the donor's great-grandmother, Mrs Lillie Mary Holinger. The Holinger family lived at Panton Hill when World War I broke out. They moved to Canterbury, Melbourne, in 1918, and in the 1930s moved to Ferny Creek. Mrs Holinger's daughter, also Lillie Mary, born in 1896, married returned serviceman David James Gillespie in 1922.

Badges were displayed on ribbons during and after World War I, commemorating involvement in the war effort. Rosalie Triolo notes that children particularly enjoyed displaying badges that they had bought as fund-raisers for the war. One former child, Winifred Grassick, remembered that Red Cross buttons were posted to schools each month by the Education Department. to be sold for a shilling each. 'They surely must have raised a significant sum because they were a regular feature of even our small school. We took an interest and pride in being able to display a ribbon containing the whole sequence', she remembered. (Rosalie Triolo, 2012, 'Our Schools and the War', p.81).

The badges have been removed from their original ribbon by Museum Victoria staff for conservation reasons.

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