Holbrook
It's wonderful to be here in Holbrook - and what a fantastic achievement we celebrate today.
An exercise in nation-building that spans - and joins - decades, governments and communities.
The entire exercise has employed about 130,000 people over the decades.
If the entire Hume duplication is valued in today's dollars it is an investment of perhaps as much as $20 billion.
No single government, no single generation, can claim the credit for this grand undertaking.
Still, as Prime Minister I am proud to be in the line of descent from Gough Whitlam, whose National Roads Act of 1974 set these works in motion.
The Hume duplication is part of my Government's enormous efforts to invest in building our nation's future - part of our $60 billion investment in transport infrastructure through our Nation Building Program.
Building or upgrading 7500km of roadway across the country - a doubling of Commonwealth investment since we came to government.
Building or upgrading 4000km of rail - a ten-fold Commonwealth investment in rail over the same period.
A hundred and sixty projects completed.
Ninety more under way.
And for the future, urban projects like Perth Light Rail and the F3-M2 Missing Link.
Australia is still a young country and nation-building is still happening here.
The Hume has been defining ‘where we go' ever since Governor Lachlan Macquarie gave the order in 1819 for the construction of a Great South Road.
A century later, the motley collection of roads connecting Melbourne and Sydney was elevated to the grand status of ‘highway'.
It would be another decade until the final section of the Hume was even sealed.
But its importance had already been decided.
The towns and cities along the Hume's 800 kilometres of tarmac are rich with history.
Hume's own family home, at Yass.
Snake Gully, with its much-loved Dog on the Tuckerbox.
At Gundagai, one of the longest bridges in NSW - a full one metre longer than the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Glenrowan, where Ned Kelly made his last stand.
Benalla and Euroa - towns with their own links to the Kelly Gang.
Or one of the small treasures: Tarcutta, half-way between Melbourne and Sydney, where truck drivers once changed shifts and where there's now a memorial wall to truckies who have lost their lives along the Hume and other highways.
Rows upon rows of names - and nicknames: Lenny. Stumpy. Daylight. Blue - because roads can tear families apart, as well as bring them closer.
Reducing the dreadful toll on our roads has always been one aim of the duplication of the Hume.
In 1976 there were almost two and a half thousand crashes and 71 deaths along the NSW sections of the Hume alone.
With dual carriageway the length of the highway, crashes are now in the low hundreds.
Fatalities this year are in the single digits.
I'm determined we keep saving lives and we haven't just upgraded roads to make them safer we've updated laws to make driving safer, especially through the Safe Rates legislation which passed the Parliament last year.
In a big dry country like ours, roads are like rivers. They take us places and define our geography.
Look at any map. It's the roads and the rivers that define where we go.
It's why we put them in our songs and in our stories.
In 1985 Paul Kelly released a single called From St Kilda to King's Cross.
He sang of thirteen hours on a bus, on the Hume, his face pressed against the glass, watching “the white lines rushing past.”
The time it takes to drive from Melbourne to Sydney has now been cut by three hours - Paul Kelly may need to change his lyrics.
Even a grand project like the Hume duplication always prompts mixed feelings and some homesickness for the past.
This is a project that has transformed our landscape.
Forty-nine bypasses, taking thousands of trucks off the streets of our loveliest country towns.
That has turned what was once a capital J “Journey” into a cruise-controlled, air-conditioned glide.
We all have our memories of the Hume.
The shimmer of hot road ahead that signals a summer holiday has begun.
The first sight of the city, suburb or town that lets us know we are almost home.
That won't change.
We'll just need to remember to get off the highway once in a while - taking a break here at Holbrook, or at Goulburn, or Wangaratta.
To remind ourselves that even with such a great road beneath our wheels, the journey isn't just about the destination.
Put today, we are celebrating the arrival at a long planned, long anticipated destination - the full duplication of the Hume.
Congratulations Australia!