Gone with the Wind‘Out on the plains the brolgas are dancing,” wrote the lyricist John Wheeler in the 1950s in one of his somewhat self-consciously Aussiefied “Australian Carols”. Unspoilt and pristine are favourite tourist brochure words but they expressed the exact truth about this wide landscape, veined by bushy creek beds and with hardly a trace of human habitation outside the couple of townships out of sight over the hills—until the two Moorabool “wind farms” were wished upon it by Victoria’s Green-dazzled socialist government. Wind turbines are a worldwide problem and Moorabool is a microcosm of the effects and rationalisations of their imposition on a rural locality and its small community. Bribery, or what amounts to it, can be an element in gaining community acceptance and Moorabool Wind Farms is very keen to be seen as a good corporate citizen. (Or not, if the wind doesn’t blow, as in blacked-out South Australia in 2016, an energy failure now the subject of a legal action by the energy regulator against four wind farm owners, and in Britain earlier this year—in both cases to the incalculable inconvenience not merely of those who are happy to rely on wind power but of everyone.)