Winds of change for Snowtown

Sunday Mail Adelaide
Sunday 9/11/2008 Page: 34

BAD news travels fastest on the winds of gossip. Italian gossips are called "little winds". Today, there's a bigger wind with better, brighter news. Good news. It's been a week of good news, fresh starts, hope and a brave new world.

Snowtown is an ordinary, medium-sized town in the Mid-North: silo, sandstone Soldiers Memorial Hall (with adjacent supper hall), shops open and shut, agricultural agencies, a grand pub, a "muriel" on the very clean public toilet block, a railway line, a drought and some very bad news a decade ago when foul people did foul things, none of whom had any connection to the town.

It just happened and put a fine town already struggling with a terrible drought back a lot. Then there was a great day in Snowtown. I had the pleasure of attending the opening, last Sunday, of 47 wind turbines. A wind farm for Snowtown. From the main street where 2000 people gathered to celebrate a good turn for their town, you can see the enormous blades of a turbine slowly turning in the now more valuable wind over the Barunga Ranges to the west.

For generations, the farmers of Snowtown have looked to the west for the weather - squinted into a harsh sunset. But now they look to the west for another symbol of hope and even prosperity. There was a big country fair to welcome Premier Mike Rann to open the wind farm built by NZ company Trust Power and the international company Suzlon.

It's magic to ponder that 58 per cent of the nation's wind energy comes from SA - that's more than all the other states combined. Clean power. The turbines are big windmills and cockies know the value of windmills, and the feathered cockies and other birds soon learn to fly around them. It was a wonderful day.

Steak and sausages sizzled, hotdogs boiled and strawberries macerated in a friendly, welcoming town that has struggled for survival and redemption from trespassers. It is, financially, a poor town but rich in spirit and love of land, and each other. So poor is Snowtown that the Lutheran op shop takes things on consignment. My heart bleeds.

We were excellently entertained by country singers Danny Hooper, Gary Mannion and the children of the Snowtown Area School and the Kadina Mixed Choir; there were popular bus tours of the wind farm and kids on decorated bikes. Boundless joy. A display of the wind farms and the mounted 44m wind turbine blade - which is much bigger than you think - will bring interest and tourism.

And the sun shone when I met a wonderful lady called Edna Altmann. She's "coming up 80 and I've lived here my whole life". She worked for 37 years in the Snowtown Hospital laundry ("hard work never killed anyone") and she's one of the big-boned, bighearted, big-smiling, big-spirited country women who truck no nonsense, really run the town and should run the world. Wise, funny. A helper. A doer. A worker.

One of nine children of a farm worker she walked 8km to school at Wokurna over the hills and not so far away; had to leave school at 12 to work at the pub as a waitress; married, worked, was widowed and is now a blessed great-grandmother. Salt of the earth. It's her country and her town, and she's proud of it. She's grown out of this place and, like it, she endures. She sits with her posse of card ladies with broad country faces ravaged by skin cancers, and they look and laugh and love. Snowtown is blessed by Edna Altmann and every community is blessed by her like. Cherish them.

Nobody speaks much of the horror at Snowtown but Edna is hurt by an article in a Melbourne newspaper in which Melbourne footballers list 10 reasons why they wouldn't want to live in Adelaide, and one of them is Snowtown. Bloody nerve. The joke's on them because when those footballers in Melbourne turn on a light, a coffee maker or a hair dryer they're powered by the wind farms of the Snowtown they fear. The wind dries tears and heals, and brings rain and power to Snowtown. On. On. On.