Fleurs Monument Celebrates Sky Country Heritage

A new monument aside the toll-free M12 Motorway has been revealed in a nod to the area’s heritage. Fleurs Monument, around 200m east of the Warami Drive interchange, pays homage to the area’s special connection with our skies. For thousands of years, the area was abundant with “Sky Country” stories where local First Nations peoples told stories garnered from the stars, such as the Great Emu in the sky. The emu in the Milky Way is visible through connecting the dark spaces between the stars that gave the appearance of our native bird. Revealed last year, those stories are being represented through a 30m sphere erected at the airport interchange as part of a collaboration between artists and indigenous groups. The new Fleurs Monument has been located next to what was originally a runway, the first Badgerys Creek Airport built in 1944. Back then, with the war effort raging across the Pacific, a new aerodrome was needed and Fleurs became a significant airfield. After the war, its future was debated, even being proposed as Sydney’s second airport, but ultimately it would become the site of some of our earliest forays into radio astronomy. Set up by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and later run by the University of Sydney and then Western Sydney University, Fleurs was a leading facility in those pioneering days and scientists there used their research to help corroborate The Big Bang theory during the 1950s and 60s. The monument is called “the absence of Shain Cross Poles”. It celebrates the home of four innovative radio telescopes: the Mills Cross, Shain Cross, the Chris Cross and the Fleurs Synthesis Telescope and named after three inventors, Dr Wilbur ‘Chris’ Christiansen, Emeritus Professor Bernard Mills and Alex Shain. Fleurs Synthesis Telescope listened to the stars with six telescopes built in the 70s and was the most powerful radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. For many years it was cutting edge and some of the technology from this site has been used to help develop our most modern radio astronomy facilities today. But Fleurs Telescope was more than looking into the heavens – it was the bringing together of great minds and three of those scientists including Dr John O’Sullivan went on to develop Wi-Fi. The new monument incorporates footings from the old telescopes and overlooks the site where the array once sat. Adjacent is a resting place with a eucalypt canopy shelter from the sun, representing one of six Aboriginal seasons, another feature celebrated along the new motorway. Ready to open early next year, the toll-free M12 Motorway is a 16 kilometre east-west connection from Elizabeth Drive and the interchange at the M7 in the east through to The Northern Road in the west. The $2.1 billion project is jointly funded by the Australian and NSW Governments.