Where have all the windmills gone.

I am now after a windmill and high tank to replace the electric pump on the Leven River that supplies the house and troughs with water. Wind is the greatest natural source of energy and it is freely available day and night. No level of government has yet worked out how to charge for the wind, though I have no doubt they would if they could only work out how.

A farm should always have a windmill but here in Tasmania they are about as common as hens teeth.

At Varna we had three windmills, pumping water in an endless cycle. All windmills, regardless of brand shared some common endearing features. The wooden platform just below the head rots after about ten years exposure to the sun and rain and is never replaced. To stand on an old platform is to court a speedy and somewhat painful descent however the narrow iron supports can always be relied on to safely bear your weight. The top five feet of the tower is always greasy and treacherously slippery from the slow oil leaks accumulated over decades of use.

Jimmys Bore

Jimmys Bore had a 21 foot Southern Cross standing on a 50 foot three legged tower. This pumped up water from 400 feet underground for stock. Every six months Michelle and I had to pull the twenty lengths of 4 inch casing to remove the hard white sodic deposits that would slowly choke the pump.    

Salty Bore

Salty Bore had a 20foot D pattern Comet on a 45 foot four legged tower. The water in this bore was so salty it was of marginal value. Stock would drink it but only if they had no other option.

House mill.

The house had a 12 foot mill on a 25 foot tower that pumped water from the dam up to the high tank that supplied the house. It almost looked like any other 12 foot C pattern Comet but the name “Sidney Williams and Company” proudly cast in iron revealed its age. It had stood on the dam bank since some time prior to 1912 and is likely to be there yet, still reliably pumping water as it has done for all the past century. Sidney Williams produced windmills from1879 in Rockhampton under the Sidney Williams & Company brand, only introduced the famous Comet name in 1912. These are simple, reliable, direct action mills running in Spotted Gum bearings. If the oil pot is topped up every couple of years and the wicks replaced every ten or twenty years, the wooden bearings last indefinitely. The C and D pattern Comets are still in production, a design almost unchanged in over a hundred years. Workplace health and safety requirements have led to a metal platform replacing the wooden one, ladder platforms, and other changes to the tower to try to make them idiot proof.

A completely pointless exercise.

One of the immutable laws of physics tell us that if you make something idiot proof the only certain outcome is a  bigger idiot. The safest person up a windmill is a frightened one. Completely bloody useless but perfectly safe. With both legs and both arms wrapped through the tower, you would need a crowbar to prise them loose.

Windmills are an inseparable part of the heritage of the bush. They are a tangible link between the past and the future where windmills will continue to pump water through this century and the next.