Darkness
Into Light

Prologue

A town that went dark at night

In the 1910s, light itself was a luxury a country council had to borrow heavily to buy.

From the 1880s, electricity had begun to light the streets and run the trams of Australia's cities. It was fed by local direct-current generators and coal-fired engines, in an unregulated scramble of power companies that grew large without rules, standards or much reliability. The states eventually saw the need for proper authorities and high-voltage alternating-current networks. Tasmania and Victoria led the way. New South Wales lagged behind, its progress blocked by the owners of private generators.

Before the state schemes arrived, regional towns had to fend for themselves by building their own coal, gas or steam plants. Governments would not fund these directly, so municipal councils borrowed the money and repaid it through charges on their ratepayers. For a small rural town, the sums were enormous.

Smaller towns without coal gas were most likely simply dark at night. Households lit their rooms with kerosene lamps or acetylene gas. So when the chance of electric light appeared, the uptake was rapid, for it was more convenient, and often cheaper, than anything that had come before. This is the story of one such town, and the family man who carried its hardest fight to the finish.

Chapter One

The long wait for the current

Corowa first dreamed of electric light in 1911. It would take years of frustration before the lamps even flickered on.

The council first considered "electric lighting" in 1911, instructing its consulting engineer to draw up a combined lighting-and-pumping scheme. But money was tight and the work crawled. By 1912 the townsfolk had run out of patience. Businesses were reviving their old acetylene plants, and even the Anglican Church gave up waiting and switched from kerosene to gas.

At last, late in 1913, the machinery was installed and the streets were wired. The contractors decorated the council chambers with floral designs, the band was engaged and the town prepared to be "transformed from darkness into light."

The formal switching-on came in January 1914: a "smoke social" at the School of Arts, federal and state members invited. Yet only fifteen or twenty homes had been connected, and the crowd, the Free Press noted dryly, "took the whole business as if it were an everyday occurrence." The new plant, a suction-gas engine driving a direct-current dynamo, was expected to serve the town for twenty years.

It would not last ten.

Chapter Two

The engines that exploded

Demand outran the plant. By the 1920s the town's lights flickered and failed, and twice the machinery blew itself to pieces.

Barely five years after installation, the works that were meant to serve Corowa for two decades were already overwhelmed. By 1919 the council needed another £4,000 for additional plant. The aging suction-gas engines, single-cylinder beasts that made gas from coal, were run flat out, day and night, seven days a week, until they began to break.

A year later it happened again, and this time the engineer himself was in the building.

From the family research Mr Grimmond very likely deserved a gallantry award as well as his later pay rise. He was nearly killed by flying metal from an exploding engine on two separate occasions, yet kept the worn-out plant running so the town would not go dark.

This was the crisis the council faced: a failing plant, a frightened town and the knowledge that converting the whole system to alternating current, replacing every motor and meter in Corowa, would cost a fortune the ratepayers could ill afford. Into this difficulty stepped a relatively new alderman with a Victorian idea.

Chapter Three

A current across the border

Why build a costly new plant when reliable hydro power was being strung up just across the Murray, in another state?

In December 1922 Alderman Piggin put the radical idea to council: rather than saddle the community with a £30,000 debt for a new plant, why not couple Corowa to Victoria's great Morwell or Sugarloaf schemes, whose current would be available in two or three years? Alderman Dawe seconded the motion. There was just one problem, and Alderman Chivell named it instantly.

He was right. Victoria's legislation forbade the Commission from selling current outside the state, and the reply, when it came in January 1923, was blunt: the law prevented supply to Corowa, and the towns nearby would not be served for three or four years anyway. Disheartened, the aldermen turned back to plans for their own new steam-driven plant, a scheme estimated at over £21,000.

But unbeknownst to the aldermen, the cogs of interstate diplomacy were still turning. The Border Railways Act of 1922 had established a principle: that border towns should be able to receive benefits of transport and trade from a neighbouring state without obstruction. If Victoria could run railways into New South Wales, why not electricity? In November 1923 the town clerk, in Melbourne, read in the press that the Commission might reconsider. He went straight to its office.

The door had opened. In January 1924 the Commission laid out its terms: bulk supply from the Yallourn power station, carried north on a new transmission line, at a guaranteed price and even an offer of second-hand engines to keep the old plant limping along until the change-over. Corowa would be one of the very first New South Wales towns to be hitched to Victoria's grid.

Chapter Four

A council under fire

As the old plant faltered, the local press turned the changeover into a public brawl.

The wait was agony. Through 1925 the engines were kept "running 24 hours daily and seven days a week," the battery scrapped, a ton of fuel burned each day and customers complained the daytime "juice" was so poor it was almost impossible to work by. The Corowa Free Press sharpened its pen against the council; the Corowa Chronicle defended it. The feud spilled into the council chamber itself.

Yet even as the criticism flew, the work was racing ahead. The Commission's gangs, the papers admitted, "accomplished wonders since they crossed over into N.S.W. territory," working early and late, Saturdays and even Sundays. Portions of the town were already coupled to the new mains, glowing with "a beautifully clear and uniform light."

Epilogue

A new life for the town, and a quiet legacy

Corowa became a model: the first town in New South Wales to standardise its supply, and a doorway for the whole Riverina.

The change was immediate and practical. With current at just twopence a unit, electric cooking, heating and cleaning became "an economically sound proposition." The council fitted out a showroom in the chambers where housekeepers could inspect ranges and vacuum cleaners, and offered to wire any home in the district. Sanger Street, lit by nine 1,000-candlepower lamps on neat 40-foot poles, became "one of the best illuminated streets in any country town in the state."

Other Murray River towns now lined up to be connected; New South Wales' own hydro projects were still many years away. And at the centre of it all stood Alderman Dawe, re-elected Mayor that December despite a strangely apathetic poll, his fellow aldermen lining up to defend a man who "worked without showing it." A year later, arguing to hold the rates steady, he summed up the whole struggle in a few plain sentences.

Dawe served as alderman for only six years and as Mayor for three. Perhaps, the family research reflects, he felt that what he had achieved in that short time was service enough to his community, after the sacrifices of the recent war. The achievement might seem unremarkable today, until you remember the state politics, the interstate rivalry, the exploding engines and the feuding press it had to survive. That it succeeded at all was a matter of vision, teamwork and stubborn civic leadership.