Great Emu in the Sky

“This project goes beyond road-building. It shows how infrastructure can honour Country, and uplift the communities we build in. The ‘Great Emu in the Sky’ is more than a marker — it’s a legacy.”

What a wonderful paean about such a basic thing as infrastructure! Surely this must have come from a serious First Nations political leader? But no. They were actually the words of an engineer – Nick Fryday, who happens to be the NSW boss of the Georgiou Group, a civil and building construction company in Australia which proudly claims to “deliver high-quality solutions across transport, resources, building, utilities, energy and Defence”.

Clearly the First Nations connection has touched him: “We’re proud to have helped create something that will welcome the world to Western Sydney,” he concludes.

But hang on – what is this ‘Great Emu in the Sky’?

It’s hard to describe without images. But I can report that it’s built from 3.8kms of twisted steel that were assembled on site into a mighty nest or spherical dome. Within it, more than eleven hundred lights shimmer on a skein of wires, occasionally revealing two emu forms, each only visible from certain viewpoints. One is a male emu sitting on the nest, and one is the legendary Dark Emu flying across the night sky in a gap in the Milky Way.

Amazingly, it all, began with a single line proposal made 7 years ago.

And now it will greet arrivals at the new Western Sydney (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport when it opens to flights next month on 25 October.

For the Great Emu sits on a hill at the junction of two motorways – M12 and M7, and is a NSW Transport project – one so expensive that no one on my official tour would venture a price! But even the State bureaucrats had got just a little carried-away by the First Nations connection, declaring: “To ensure Transport is delivering initiatives to enhance Aboriginal participation, the M12 Motorway has provided $19 million to Aboriginal communities since the project started in August 2022. By end of June 2024, the project has spent around 2.2% of the total project value in Aboriginal businesses. In addition to this, the M12 has employed more than 390 Aboriginal people and has hired 23 Aboriginal businesses”.

Apart from businesses, the Great Emu did of course need both artists and knowledge-holders – specifically its co-creators, who were:
Danny Eastwood (Ngemba), Jamie Eastwood (Ngemba/Dharug), Barry Gunther (Gandangara), Danielle Mate (Murrawarri/Euahlayi), Jasmine Seymour (Dharug), Leanne Watson (Dharug), Frances Bodkin (D’harawal), Julie Jones (Dharug), Corina Norman (Dharug – Warmuli/Cannemegal). Very much a Dharug project telling the Dharug story of how Mariong, the Emu and Mother Spirit became the Milky Way. And the Dharug Six Seasons are represented by colour washes projected on to the nest to reflect the current season. It’s red currently for Mariong Chasing the Male Emu. Later (in order) the Creation Phase, Sitting on the Waterhole, Male Emu on the Nest, Ceremony Time and the Dry. Only the Chase and the Nest will actually feature despite those 1100 lights.

Mind you, the single line that got things going seems to have been penned by someone described as “the lead conceptual artist on the work’s genesis, Tim Moriarty (Yanyuwa)”. And the alert may have picked up that surname as the offspring of John and Ros Moriarty, founders of the renowned Balarinji Design Studio. They haven’t moved on entirely from dotting airliners, but seem increasingly to be specialising in Indigenous public artwork projects – for which there seems to be both political need and generous funding.

So the Great Emu is not alone on the motorways of western Sydney. All the bridges over the M12 are decorated with those six seasonal motifs and even the accompanying cycle path has gum-leaf rest areas. Meanwhile, the nearby M7 has nine Dharug artworks ranging from Frontier Warriors via Gili, a 50 metre high pole surmounted by a Gymea Lily, a Dharug symbol of fire, to statues of the great progenitors of the Dharug, Maria Lock and her convict husband Robert, via their nine children.

A final irony. While so much of traditional South Eastern Australian Aboriginal life from the past his disappeared in the face of colonial invasion, as the western Sydney motorways were being dug on Dharug land, no less than 90,000 of their artefacts were recovered. So many, in fact that museums have no space for them, and they have found a resting-place buried in the hill that now houses the Great Emu.

Url: