Remembrance Driveway

The Remembrance Driveway is one of Australia's most profound road journeys — a living tribute to the men and women who served and sacrificed for this country. Stretching between Sydney and Canberra along the Hume Highway and Federal Highway corridor, the route is lined with rest areas named in honour of Victoria Cross recipients, Australia's highest military decoration for valour. Each stop bears the name of a VC recipient, from Sir Roden Cutler VC near Sydney's outskirts to the Edwards VC Rest Area as you approach the national capital. Together, these twenty named stops form a continuous thread of remembrance across the New South Wales tablelands and into the ACT. Driving the Remembrance Driveway invites travellers to pause — literally — and reflect on the individuals behind the names. Recipients honoured along the route include veterans of World War II actions across North Africa and the Pacific, as well as conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Keith Payne VC, one of Australia's last living VC recipients at the time of the route's dedication, is among those commemorated. The stops are not merely places to stretch your legs; they are quiet monuments set into the Australian landscape, reminding every passing traveller that the road itself carries history. Whether you're making the Sydney–Canberra run for work or leisure, the Remembrance Driveway gives the journey a weight and meaning that transcends the kilometres.

The Remembrance Driveway was conceived as a permanent, landscape-scale memorial to Australians awarded the Victoria Cross — the Commonwealth's supreme award for acts of conspicuous bravery in the presence of the enemy. The Sydney to Canberra corridor was a fitting choice: it connects Australia's largest city to its national capital, a city built around the institutions of government, memory, and national identity, including the Australian War Memorial. The VC recipients honoured along the route span multiple conflicts and theatres of war. World War II is heavily represented, with figures such as Jack Edmondson — the first Australian VC recipient of that war — among those commemorated. Others reflect the breadth of Australian military service: Badcoe VC and Keith Payne VC represent the Vietnam generation, while the collective roll call of names — Kingsbury, Chowne, Derrick, French, Kibby, Gratwick, Gurney — reads like a honour board drawn from the Western Desert, New Guinea, and the islands of the Pacific. Naming rest areas after individual recipients was a deliberate act of humanisation. Rather than a single monument in a capital city, the Remembrance Driveway distributes its tribute across the everyday landscape that Australians travel through. Each stop asks drivers to connect a name to a person, and a person to a story of courage under fire. In this sense, the driveway functions as both infrastructure and memorial — a rare combination that gives the mundane act of a highway rest stop a quiet, lasting significance.