Modern-day bushrangers: Locals rebel as wind towers threaten Anzac legacy

Bowning locals are up in arms over a proposal for a 90-turbine wind farm on their doorstep - vowing they won’t put up with modern-day bushrangers coming to seize their town, Riverina MP Michael McCormack writes.

In World War I, the tiny community of Bowning sent 61 valiant Diggers to fight the good fight.

A roll of honour remembering these heroes hangs in the local hall which was erected eight years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front.

When World War II erupted, the district again sent its best and bravest, with 126 enrolling.

Bowning locals love this country. Their forebears bled for it. Many never made it home from foreign battlefields.

What would those courageous ANZACs then make of the beautiful countryside they fought so hard for and some even died for, being given up to a greedy, multinational company to litter with 90 260-metre high wind towers destroying the landscape, people’s lifestyles, livelihoods and the beauty and serenity for which the place is renowned?

Bowning locals overwhelmingly rejected a proposal for a 90-turbine wind farm at a public meeting. Picture: Martin Ollman

Would they think their sacrifice – for God, King and Country – was all worth it?

Last week, more than 200 Bowning and district residents crammed inside their tiny community hall, to hear the proponents of a renewable energy project spruik their stuff.

It did not go down well at all.

Locals are devastated. Their region, with some of the best arable farmland in the Yass Valley, is not within a Renewable Energy Zone.

But because Wind Prospect’s proposal has what is called a State Significant Development status, any local considerations are ridden roughshod over by the powers that be in far-off Macquarie Street, Sydney.

And the Federal Minister for Ruining the Regions, Chris Bowen, could not care less.

When I jacked up, he turned it into a joke during Parliamentary Question Time.

He is an embarrassment and his rush to renewables as the driver to net zero is a fraud.

All the while locals such as mother-of-three sheep farmer Emma Webb, who’ll oppose the proposal every step of the way, are left anxious and despairing.

The good folk of Bowning are not alone.

New England MP Barnaby Joyce and Riverina MP Michael McCormack at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Nearby Binalong, best known perhaps for where the Ben Hall Gang bushranger, Johnny Gilbert met his fate in 1865, is also at the mercy of the wind tower takeover.

Or as Emma terms it, “torture”.

Famed Australian poet Andrew “Banjo” Paterson, who went to school at Binalong, once penned a poem about Gilbert in which he wrote:

“We have all of us a fancy for experiments in pillage,

Yet never have we seized a town, or even sacked a village.”

Banjo considered there was, back then, some honour among thieves, including Gilbert.

Meanwhile, up the road at Crookwell, Cheryl O’Donnell said the constant reverberations from the wind tower which shadows her property, does her head in.

And yet, inexplicably, there are even more wind towers proposed for this region.

Further west, but still in the sprawling Riverina electorate, Rural Fire Service volunteers have told local farmers they will refuse to respond if a proposed Battery Energy Storage System near Mangoplah goes ahead and then one day catches on fire.

These hardy fire fighting volunteers are concerned for their health and safety because of the toxicity of the flames.

At places such as Bookham, Gregadoo and Maxwell, also in the Riverina, they are up in arms about unwanted renewable projects looming large on their doorstep.

Enough is enough.

Locals say they won’t put up with any modern-day bushrangers coming to seize their town!

Michael McCormack is the Federal Member for Riverina

Originally published as Modern-day bushrangers: Locals rebel as wind towers threaten Anzac legacy