{ story.summary|safe|escape }

• Remembering their sacrifices: Ex-POW Paul Lavallee, 94, and Miranda RSL Sub-branch president and welfare officer Bruce Grimley at Miranda RSL. The club recently held its annual lunch for former POWs. Unfortunately because of thinning numbers, only Mr Lavallee was able to attend. Picture: Jane Dyson

• Wish granted: Miranda RSL Sub-branch members (from left) Bruce Taylor, Bruce Grimley, Arie Hanavaar and Alan Lark at the Miranda war memorial. Picture: James Alcock

VETERANS will have their wish granted — Miranda RSL’s historical war memorial will be moved to a safer and more accessible spot in Seymour Shaw Park, thanks to Sutherland Shire Council voting $50,000 towards the relocation.

The state government will donate $40,000 to the project, Olsens Funerals $15,000 and the balance will come from community contributions.

The club had petitioned the council for several years to relocate the memorial from its present spot in the cul-de-sac at the end of Central Road to the park, 20 metres north.

The heritage-listed sandstone memorial is the site of the state’s largest Anzac Day dawn service outside the Sydney central business district, attracting more than 5000 people.

The crowds stand in Central Road for the service but Miranda RSL Sub-branch wants to relocate the memorial to the park to improve its access and amenity and to safely accommodate visitors and crowds.

The memorial was built originally in 1918 in the grounds of the old Miranda Public School to honour local citizens who had served in World War I.

The school site was sold in 1968 to the developers of Miranda Fair shopping centre and the memorial was moved to its present position.

The club had raised about $105,000 towards the memorial’s relocation and the council’s $50,000 grant means it will move ahead with relocation which is expected to begin in mid-2013.

The memorial will be dismantled and rebuilt in the park, surrounded by landscaping and gardens.

New commemorative plaques will be added to honour Australia’s military involvement in other world conflicts.

“The new location will allow services to be held in a safer and more dignified setting with disabled access,” said Miranda RSL Sub-branch president and welfare officer Bruce Grimley.

“Families will abe able to hold private ceremonies at the memorial in more private and comfortable surroundings.”

“The extra space will be able to accommodate the growing numbers of school students and young families who attend the Anazc Day dawn service.

“The extra plaques will be able to education future generations.”

Is it a good idea to move the memorial to Seymour Shaw Park? 

Bill Tonnesen is distracted by dog shit.

A wet, orange-brown turd on a concrete paver at one of the several rental properties he’s recently renovated has stopped him dead in his tracks.

“Oh, noooooo!” Tonnesen moans, pointing at the mess. “How did that get here? We’d better . . . what can . . . oh, this isn’t good!”

“It’s okay,” his young female assistant mutters quietly, sounding like an extra-patient mom whose child has just dropped his ice cream cone. “Just leave it. You can’t control everything.”

See a slideshow of Bill Tonnesen’s work.

Bill Tonnesen would like to control everything. And it’s that fact — perhaps more than the work he does and certainly more than his peculiar, often off-putting personality — that has stood in the way of the immortality that Tonnesen’s friends and colleagues say he’s really after.

Toward that end, Tonnesen — who previously has attempted fame as a contemporary artist and courted infamy as a Holocaust activist — apparently has decided to completely revamp Tempe in his image. He’s recently produced some stunning renovations of several dreary Tempe apartment buildings and single-family tract homes. There’s Casa Carmel, on Rural Road, with its installation of rusted water heaters. There’s the 28-unit Rothko House, just up the street from Casa Carmel, with its rusted steel wall and its now-notorious statue of an obese naked woman. And there’s the South Granada, a red brick stunner on Granada Drive, with a row of oxidized ovens out front. Not to mention the eye-catching tract homes, with their paint blasted away to reveal raw brick, many of them obscured by entire groves of trees jammed onto a tiny front lawn. And always, always Tonnesen’s sculptures — many of them life-size statues of Tonnesen himself, in various guises: holding an umbrella, pointing at a giant thermometer, perched atop an air-conditioning unit. But his accolades — many of them well-deserved, for Tonnesen’s work is truly distinctive and well-wrought — often are drowned out by the moaning of people who’ve had dealings with Tonnesen.

Like the employees worried that he talks too much about working without proper permitting. And the city officials who felt he was forcing his public art onto the Tempe Flour Mill site, after he sneaked two of his sculptures onto the site on the evening of its grand opening.

Tonnesen, who’s 58, moved to the Valley when he was still a boy. He studied philosophy at Arizona State University but dropped out and got a job trimming trees. That led to a landscape architect’s license and, eventually, a design-and-construction firm, Tonnesen, Inc. Lately, the firm has moved into development and, as usual, is attracting attention both positive and contrary.

“The problem with Bill isn’t a lack of talent,” says a colleague of Tonnesen’s who refused to be named because, he says, any public commentary on Tonnesen leads to days and days of e-mails and phone calls and recriminations.

“It’s that he doesn’t listen, and he wants everything his way. So you ask him for a glass of water, and he brings you a swimming pool. And you say, ‘Put the swimming pool in my backyard, then,’ and he mounts it on your roof and plants 70 trees around it and then encases it in a big metal box made out of recycled refrigerator shelving, because it’s what he wants.”

This having-things-his-way routine continues to infuriate his clients, and to dog the landscape architect during what critics and fans are calling “The Third Act of Bill Tonnesen.” And so he has, since 2008, been buying his own properties, so that he can do whatever he wants with them.

And Tempe is starting to look like Tonnesen Town.

“Most people budget so little for the fix-up,” gripes Tonnesen, who brings in a designer to renovate his interiors. “I despise people who do that. If you go back to that house two years later, it will look nothing different than anything in the neighborhood. Paint is the most superficial thing you can do. Paint is nothing! It’s not planting trees!”

Tree-planting is a Tonnesen thing. So is making every house he renovates into something that looks nothing at all like “anything in the neighborhood.” Every project — especially his own Tempe home in the University Park neighborhood, a Tonnesen original — combines his backgrounds in landscaping and contemporary fine art and, whether you love him or hate him, is distinctive and eye-catching.

A devotee of architectural integrity, Tonnesen favors solid-block masonry buildings with sleek, clean lines and neatly graphed gardens out of which one or two of his patinaed metal sculptures erupts. At one home, Tonnesen welded together a stack of old radiators to form a soaring statue; at another, he’s caged rows of tiny trees into a grouping of rusted metal boxes.

He’s transformed several dull-as-dirt multi-family properties into public art installations at which one might live, like the eight-unit apartment court on South Granada Drive he bought earlier this year, a standard-issue complex he quickly turned on its head with a grove of eucalyptus trees, a grid-shaped central garden, and a giant steel cube crawling with watermelon vines as its courtyard’s focal point. Out front, a row of rusted vintage ovens that Tonnesen removed from the apartments are displayed — transformed from junkyard debris into metal sculptures, each of them labeled with the name of a different famous and long-dead artist.

The clean-up of Maunalua Bay continues and sometimes it’s in relatively small steps.

A student group at Kaiser High School is doing its part to make a difference.

Relatively speaking, it’s a small patch of land, called a rain garden. Last year, the Kaiser Rotary Interact club planted the garden to enhance the landscape and prevent a major problem.

“Erosion and polluted water run-off has become a big problem in Maunalua Bay so rain gardens like this by securing sediments in the ground, it prevents the run-off from going into the bay,” says Kira Fox, who is part of the Interact Club.

“And the sediment coming down from this upper parking lot behind the cafeteria and during heavy rains, there would be mud that would cross over the sidewalk, sometime into the classroom building, down in to the band room,” says Scott Murakami of PBR Hawaii.

Scott works for an architectural/landscaping firm and – as it happens – as a Kaiser alum.

“Yes, I graduated a while back but definitely it’s good to do things to give back to the high school,” he says.

All the students try to keep the rain garden free of litter. It is filled with native Hawaiian plants.

“The area before was very dry and barren and now to see something so flourishing is really nice and it gives the campus kind of a down to earth feel and I really like it,” Fox says. “And we planted the garden. The hole was dug but all the plants you see now, we planted that day. We put in some rocks and it was a really fun thing to do.”

The Interact club received an award from Scenic Hawaii for its work on the garden.

“Interact Club is a division of the Rotary Club for students in high schools and middle schools if they want to get involved in their community. Interact club gives them a chance to volunteer and put themselves out there and kind of try to make a difference,” Fox says.