Building bridges from north to south and back
News
Mary, Catherine and Elizabeth were the stars of an early morning ceremony to launch South Australia’s biggest ever infrastructure project in southern Adelaide on Monday this week.
State Premier Peter Malinauskas and Archbishop Patrick O’Regan were at the South Road HQ of the Tunnels to Darington (T2D) project on Monday 25 May to officially welcome the first of three breathtaking, tunnel boring machines (TBMs) that will take Adelaide’s motorway transport far into the 21st century.
The TBMs will plough through eight to 10 metres of earth per day beneath a 10.5kilometre stretch of land that will form the improved, and non stop, motorway corridor just to the west of the Adelaide CBD.
Despite rain showers and omnipresent gusts of bitingly cold wind, several hundred workers and VIP guests watched as the Premier cut a ribbon in a ceremony akin to launching a ship, with a bottle of SA sparkling wine smashed against the giant TBM that runs to 100 metres long and 15 metres tall, more than the height of Thebarton Theatre.
Arhcbishop O’Regan and Fr Joseph give some scale to the tunnel boring machines.
“South Australia is a special place to live,” the Premier said. (But) we need “to make it a better place to live” before unveiling the names of the three machines which refer to the state’s famous, late 19th century female suffragettes Mary Lee, Catherine Helen Spence and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls.
South Australia’s Constitution Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act, in 1894, granted women the right to vote and the right to stand for Parliament.
SA had been a leader in this field, the first state to given women the political vote anywhere in the worldthe Premier told the onlookers who included Joe Szakacs, the new SA Minister for Infrastructure and Transport. These dynamic, and quite extraordinary and expensive (about $40 million each) machines, are named in the suffragettes’ honour.
Archbishop Patrick O’Regan then blessed the first TBM with holy water as well as a small, porcelain statue of St Barbara placed at the entrance to the Clovelly Park tunnel which forms the starting point of the South Rd tunnel. St Barbara is the patron saint, and protector, of tunnellers and miners and such a ceremony has long been integral to commencing underground work across the world.
The tunnels, and their accompanying 21 bridges, are very much about “building bridges and not walls,” with the local community (and further afield) the Archbishop said. Connection matters was the essence.
A more detailed version of this story long with photographs from the Monday 25 May ceremony can be seen in The Southern Cross newspaper which is available in print from Friday 29 May.
