Australia's synchrotron coming to a drive-in near you

A vacant site in Clayton that served as a drive-in theatre for more than 25 years is to be the home of Australia's first synchrotron. PENNY FANNIN reports.

Artist's impression of the Australian synchrotron at Monash. Image courtesy of the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development, State Government of Victoria.

In the summer of 1803, a surveyor known as Charles Robbins climbed a tall tree in an area now known as the Melbourne suburb of Kew and looked toward the distant Dandenong Ranges. He described what he saw as "gently rising hills, clothed with trees for 10 or 15 miles".

Among these hills was the land that would later become the site of Monash University's Clayton campus and the future home of Australia's first synchrotron, a giant microscope that uses intense light to illuminate the molecular structure of materials.

The synchrotron is yet to be built but vibration and geological testing has been completed, and site works are expected to begin in early 2003.

A Monash master of communications student, Ms Stefanie Pearce, has researched the history of the site and the circumstances that led to Victoria, and Monash, becoming the home for the synchrotron.

Her research has found that the synchrotron site was once a cattle run.

"In 1835, a Scottish tenant farmer named John McMillan leased five square miles of country around Scotchman's Creek - the future home of the synchrotron lay just within the southern boundary of McMillan's lease," she says.

In 1853, after the "parish of Mulgrave" had been surveyed, the future synchrotron site was bought by John Cooke for Ł6 an acre. Cooke and his brother Henry founded The Age newspaper in October 1854, but sold the paper within a few months.

A century after the first land sales in Mulgrave, Australia's first drive-in theatre opened in Melbourne. Three years later, in 1957, one of Australia's largest and best Metro drive-in theatres was opened on the site at the corner of Blackburn and Wellington roads in Clayton.

The Clayton drive-in screened its last movie in 1984, and by 1990, the screens had been removed. Now only the foundations that once supported the giant screens remain.

"During its 27 years as a drive-in theatre, strong beams of light lit up the two giant movie screens every night in a celebration of culture and the power of technology," Ms Pearce says. "Twenty years on, the site will again support a source of brilliant light and be a visible icon of technological achievement."

Physicist Professor Rob Lewis will head up synchrotron research at Monash.

The impending arrival of the synch-rotron has prompted Monash University to appoint Professor Rob Lewis as its inaugural professor of x-ray and synchrotron physics.

Professor Lewis has arrived at Monash from the UK with plans to continue his world-class research into how x-ray techniques could be used to improve the early diagnosis of breast cancer.

Professor Lewis says the construction of Australia's first synchrotron at Monash will offer Australian scientists greater oppor-tunities to undertake world-class research.

"The unsurpassed precision of synch-rotrons makes them invaluable tools for designing new drugs, manufacturing new-age materials and making micro-machines," he says.

"The thing that distinguishes synch-rotrons from anything we've had previously is basically the amount of light you can shine on something. Light from a synchrotron is beamed, which means you can shine a lot of light onto a very small object. If you want to work out the structure of something, synch-rotrons can do it faster, more accurately and with a smaller bit of the substance than you might need in the laboratory."

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For more information on the Australian Synchrotron at Monash, visit www.monash.edu.au/synchrotron.

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