Bernice Davies is not one to let confusion get in the way of hospitality. She rallied quickly after a brief pause to take in our odd request.

“Of course you’re welcome to stay,” she said. “But you won’t be able to hear the mills.”

Bernice and her husband Bryan live next to one of the largest windfarms in the southern hemisphere.

One of the 17 turbines on their Burracoppin South farm is just a kilometre from their house – the closest allowable distance in most Australian jurisdictions. They are one of 11 farmers involved in the $750m Collgar windfarm near Merredin, Western Australia, a field of 111 turbines that feed into the main Collie-Kalgoorlie power line.

On Monday night the Davies family opened their home to Guardian Australia to spend the night next to a windfarm. Bernice was right; you couldn’t hear the turbines inside the house.

Bryan and Bernice Davies were among the first landowners to sign on to the Collgar windfarm and have 17 turbines on their property. They say they have suffered no negative health effects from living so close to a windfarm. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

But as any proponent of “wind turbine syndrome” will tell you, it’s infrasound – low-frequency sound beyond human hearing – that allegedly causes problems.

However, despite comments from the prime minister, Tony Abbott, that windfarms are noisy, “visually awful” and have a “potential health impact”, and from shock jock Alan Jones that living next to them was “hell”, the Davies family don’t have any complaints.

Their only gripe is that cuts to the renewable energy target mean the second stage of the development has been shelved, and they’re unlikely to get the final four turbines they had been promised.

The environment minister, Greg Hunt, last week struck a deal with crossbench senators to appoint a national windfarm commissioner to deal with community concerns about wind turbines as part of a deal to include the burning of native wood waste in the reduced renewable energy target. For its part, Collgar said it had not received a health complaint in the four years the windfarm had been in operation.

Bryan said that in Merredin, a town of fewer than 3,000 people about 250km east of Perth, the only complaints came from people whose properties fell just outside the windfarm footprint and who wanted to be involved.

“It’s funny how people who complain about them are often people who just missed out,” he said. “It’s just jealousy.”

The Davies family’s house is on a ridge about 25km from Merredin, on the edge of the wind field. They farm wheat and wool and Bryan still works the land – he jokes that his tax bill makes him too necessary to the Australian economy to retire.

From the boundary fence of their house yard, about 100 metres from their back door, you can see close to 100 turbines dotting the undulating paddocks. From this distance – approximately 900 metres – the susurrus of slowly turning blades sounds like a distant country road, minus the intermittent heavy rumble of semitrailers that are a fixture in less isolated rural areas.

The turn-off to Collgar windfarm from the Great Eastern Highway, a few kilometres out of Merredin, Western Australia. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

Noise monitoring done next to the Davies house by Collgar puts the infrasound levels at 75 decibels, 10 to 15 decibels higher than the background noise before the turbines went up.

At night, if you are quiet, you can hear them whirring from the Hills Hoist.

There is no objective measure for visual awfulness but it’s hard to find anyone in Merredin who thinks they’re ugly. People certainly think they are less ugly than Muja power station, the coal-fired generator that sits at the Collie end of the industrial power corridor, and preferable to fracking, the other energy source farmers have come to associate with their land.

Once you get into the Davies family’s house, the noise of the heat pump takes over. Bryan, in his 80s and in remission from “a fair whack of cancer”, feels the cold, and it gets below 4C on Monday night.

Eyes twinkling as his wife scolds him for calling the prime minister “Tony Rabbit”, Bryan says the fuss about the negative effects of windfarms is “crap”.

“Any ill health effects?” he asked, cracking open a second can of bitter before answering his own question. “Yes, it gives me more money so I can buy more beer.”

Bryan says he can barely hear the modern turbines, which hum at a steady 14 revs per minute. Older turbines, like the single turbine on Rottnest Island that so appalled Tony Abbott, make much more noise.

All that stuff about the row is just crap. The fridge makes more of a row than the turbines Bryan Davies

“All that stuff about the row is just crap,” he said. “The fridge makes more of a row [than the turbines]. The transformer, just out there [about 30 metres from the house] makes more row.”



Bernice is more fascinated than most about the turbines, which she says are beautiful. She plied contractors with scones to get the inside track on the construction process and can tell you how much each component part weighs. Two tiny model wind turbines sit among a nest of picture frames on the sideboard that showcase their 15 great-grandchildren.

She was never worried the turbines might affect her health.

However, Bryan said he was concerned enough about possible health risks to check with his GP before signing the contract. His doctor, he said, told him “no way”. There was no risk involved.

Real as it may feel to those who suffer from it, there’s very little scientific evidence backing the existence of wind turbine syndrome. In February a report from the National Health and Medical Research Council found “there is currently no consistent evidence that windfarms cause adverse health effects in humans”. A separate Sydney University review of 25 studies into the effects of wind turbines on human health found none produced evidence that they were actually harmful.

But that hasn’t stopped the symptoms from piling up.

Simon Chapman, a professor of public health at Sydney University, has compiled a running list of health problems and general phenomena attributed to windfarms. At the time of publishing the list stands at 244, including, but certainly not limited to: disturbed balance; blurred vision; cataracts; mass bee extinction; unexplained deaths of cattle, goats, dolphins, worms and sundry other animals; family discord; disoriented echidnas; social problems among peacocks; and eggs without yolks.

Headaches, vertigo, tinnitus, a sense of panic and a compulsion to flee are among the most commonly reported.

At a machinery shed about 10km from the Davies family’s farm, brothers Glenn and Mark Crees and their sons, Kael and Shaun, grin when we read out the last symptom.

“Compelled to flee, eh? We nearly did that because it didn’t rain,” Glenn joked. “Friday morning we were ready to cut our losses.”

The Merredin region got between 30 and 40mm over the weekend – the first decent rain in six weeks, and enough to bring crops out of the ground.

For farmers like the Crees and the Davies families and their neighbour George Giraudo, the windfarm is an anchor that gives them a guaranteed income in even the poorest year.

Farmers Glenn Crees, Murray Giles and George Giraudo at the shearing shed on Crees’s property near Merredin, Western Australia. They are among the 11 farmers who allowed Collgar to construct wind turbines on their properties. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

They don’t bring in much compared to the operating cost of broadacre cropping in Australia, but Crees says it’s enough to pay off the interest on a bank loan.

None of these men live as close to the turbines as Bryan and Bernice Davies, but they work underneath them every day. They say they’ve never experienced a negative reaction to the turbines and, short of walking sharply into one of the steel towers, don’t believe they’re likely to.

“We’re not going mad,” Mark Crees, who is also a local councillor, said. “If Tony Abbott is going to make a comment like that, he can come here to Merredin and have a look. That’s a genuine invitation.”

Giraudo piped up to confess with a huge grin that he occasionally displayed some strange behaviours – but as they’d persisted for most of his 81 years and the turbines had only been in place for the past four, “I can hardly blame the windfarm.”

“The sound, the noise, you get used to it. Now I barely hear it,” says Murray Giles. Photograph: Collgar

Still puzzling over Chapman’s list of symptoms, they dismiss those relating to animals, reasoning that if the sheep – the main livestock in the area – had a problem, they’d have noticed it by now. They may not be able to tell if the sheep had poor social skills – one of six conditions on the list that have apparently affected sheep – but they’d probably notice birth defects. “None of them have two heads,” Shaun Crees offered cheerfully.



Sheep certainly don’t appear to avoid the turbines. The hardpan bases around most turbines bear the telltale marks of sheep encampment. Technicians who come for maintenance have been known to mutter darkly about the buildup of manure. In the summer, Davies says, the flock ditches the scrubby shelter of the odd cluster of eucalypts to follow the turbine’s shade, stretching out along the shadow cast by the 80m pole like a woolly sundial.

Glenn Crees’s shearing shed is just 100m from the closest turbine, but when the electric shears are running you can’t hear it. Even the bleating of a mob in the yards is enough to drown it out.

We bump into another farmer, Murray Giles, at Crees’s shearing shed, inspecting a bale of wool. He is also one of the 11 farmers included in the windfarm footprint.

“The sound, the noise, you get used to it. Now I barely hear it,” he says.

Giles looks at the paddock next to the shearing shed, where Crees is growing wheat beneath the turbines. Collgar’s site office and substation are in there too, and are the most jarring marks on the landscape.

“I don’t know how they can say they’re visually appalling,” Giles said. “All it is is a bare hill. If anything, they’ve added to it.”

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, recently described windfarms are ‘visually awful’. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

In the morning I conduct a stern self-assessment to see if I feel any different after exposure to higher-than-usual levels of infrasound. I am no more compelled to flee than normal, but then Bernice starts making bacon and eggs, which is an effective counterstrategy. If infrasound did have an effect on me, it was to make sure I got eight hours’ sleep.

Bryan greets me at the breakfast table. “You’ve survived,” he says.

“I’ve survived,” I confirm.

“Makes you wonder what all the fuss is about, really,” he says.