Now, straight up, I promise I won’t make a habit of this. It’s not like you can’t drink your fill at a thousand different wells of public opinion. This is a travel blog and it’s about places to go and things to see. Well, I had the awesome visual pleasure of driving through and around several wind farms around Ballarat today. Oh, I left Alexandra and spent a day in Ferntree Gully getting the car serviced, brakes done etc. (Woolies unknowingly provided an overnight stay in their car park -thanks guys!)
Anyway, I’m guessing not many of you have got up close to these guys. They are like towering sentinels with their gaze fixed on some unseen horizon. Imposing and yet elegant. I started to wonder why anyone would object to wind turbines in the rural landscape. You know the ones – my brain hurts, I can’t sleep, they put subliminal messages in my head….. I realized that almost none of them have stood on the edge of an open cut coal mine 3 kilometres long and half a kilometre deep, black canyons of noise and dust. They’ve never been kept up by the rumble of coal trucks. They’ve never lived within a bulls roar of a power station. They’ve never suffered from sore throats, itchy eyes, childhood asthma, dust diseases or black lung. The total sum of their lived experience of coal is the light switch and the air conditioner.
But now, they’re confronted with the start of an energy process that delivers the same benefits without the human and social collateral and yet they are offended by such a presence in their bucholic landscape, as if progress should somehow be achieved somewhere else, out of sight. Not interested in contributing to the greater good if it reminds them that they are not rural outliers and time is not standing still for them.
Perhaps we could put them all on buses and do a tour of Muswellbrook and Singleton in NSW. Maybe all they need is a perspective like that, to be grateful that the presence of these benign gentle giants of our energy future is the only sacrifice they have to make.
Normal transmission will resume shortly. ……