Broken Hill: Powerless and left to live like mushrooms

A 3.5km section of transmission lines in the Broken Hill region were damaged in severe storms leaving towns without power.

I’m writing this on my phone. I’ve never done that before. I always write on a keyboard – old school, as my kids would say. But necessity is the mother of invention – and its sibling, lunacy.

My phone has 14 per cent of power left. I can’t charge it. The reason is because the town in which I live, Broken Hill, has been in blackout for five days.

A storm came through last week that was so ferocious it crushed the towers that ferry the lines to town, those metal monsters that march across the horizon like aliens from War of the Worlds.

The power comes on from time to time, but goes out just as quickly. It gives us just enough time to power our phones and read emails from energy providers sent the day before, alerting us to the fact the power was about to go out. They also warn we don’t have much time, and to avoid using unnecessary electrical devices – air conditioners, fridges or fans that need a power point. The only things about which they don’t seem concerned are those Energiser bunnies, which are admittedly fun to watch by candlelight.

The Broken Hill storm cut the town’s power supply. Picture: 9News

The trouble in town has been, in its own way, entertaining. Argent Street has never been so jammed with kids on BMX bikes. McDonalds, blessed with emergency power, has sold more burgers than the slaughterhouses can cope with. Home invasions are at an all-time low because burglars can’t find their way to front or back doors. I know this from personal experience.

On the first night of the blackout, I tried to enter my own home without the assistance of any light. It was so black – a moonless, starless, lightless void – that I wasn’t even sure I had the right house. I now have a scar on my mouth I doubt will ever heal, thanks to my mistaking a cactus for the doorknob. All fun and games, ain’t it?

But there’s something serious going on here, which is more than poles and wires, or the maddening labyrinth of who’s responsible – AGL, Essential Energy, Transgrid, or that Chinese mob whose name nobody even knows, let alone can pronounce. It’s a spaghetti that every journalist who’s tried – even the good ones – can’t unravel.

The real problem is that Australia doesn’t give hoot about Broken Hill. Not since we stopped producing over half on the nation’s export wealth for most of the 20th century.

Back then, the local union, the Barrier Industrial Council, held sway. When a state or federal law was passed and the BIC didn’t like it (pubs closing at 6pm, for example), they told the legislators to jam it, and the governments curtsied and left us alone.

The mines are pretty much empty now. Broken Hill is a welfare republic, a quarter of the city on pensions, the other quarter on the dole. So it’s payback time – politicians would rather us all move to the coast, or throw ourselves down those old mine shafts and never climb out. We cost them too much, and the money’s sorely needed to build stadiums where blokes smash each other’s faces in, then defecate in hotel lobbies.

When I was working for the local paper, I wrote a stormy review of our national political representative for parading through town blowing his own horn about the fact he’d given us money to fix one footpath. In kind, I promised to donate $6.95 to his medical bills if he tripped and fell on any one of the thousands of footpaths that needed attention.

He responded with a letter to the editor stating he was deeply insulted and deserved better, as he’d donated money to the paper for which I worked. Apparently, that gesture ensured him generous coverage. It might be one of the rare times a politician admitted, proudly, to corruption. But this is not unusual. It’s the way of things out here.

The storm cut Broken Hill’s power supply. Picture: 9News

During Covid, when politicians were boasting about ramping up the health system, Broken Hill Base Hospital received not one extra bed, not one extra doctor, not one extra nurse.

And the situation in Wilcannia – where people in power abandoned the Aboriginal community so they’d just get sick and die so we’d all be rid of them – actually made world news. It’s quite sick to see advertisements for Australian tourism that feature the outback. It’s like the KKK using pictures of happy black people on their literature.

This wouldn’t happen in Melbourne or any part of Sydney. If the power went out in the Opera House, there’d be a national outrage. If the power went out in Parliament House, Canberra, they’d use all the power in Broken Hill within an hour, ‘cos they’d say it was worth it.

From my home on the edge of town, I have a clear view of the Silverton wind turbines that, in the ferocious winds, are swinging like enormous fidget spinners, but the energy generated by them must be powering Anthony Albanese’s toothbrush, because the local news is telling us not to rely on them – the whirligigs cant cope, they say.

There is also a multimillion-dollar solar farm a few clicks out of town, which politicians trumpeted would create 30 billion jobs and save the town. It didn’t. It gave plenty of Queensland and Victorian engineers employment, and I guess that made some money for investment property landlords from Sydney and Melbourne, who own half the town’s empty homes.

But, again, the energy people are telling us to leave the solar farm alone. Turn off fridges. Switch off TVs. Sell the axe to save the wood.

Our freezers are full of meat, all rotten now. No big deal – it can be replaced. But there are property owners out here who survive on this – their distance from town means they stock up for months in advance. For them, this is a disaster. I’ve got 4 per cent left, so I better go.

Today, I went to the letterbox. There was a bill from Essential Energy. The power was out. Fortunately, my toilet does not rely on electricity.

Jack Marx is a writer based in Broken Hill