It could be black humour. The faded, red HAZELWOOD sign has been switched off for years – perhaps to save electricity, who knows? – but a fortnight ago it was turned back on. HAZELVOOD now lights up the night sky in neon for miles. The letter W is dodgy, but nobody could be bothered to fix it now.



It’s not a joke. It’s sentimental, a kind of tribute instantly understood by the people of the Latrobe Valley east of Melbourne. On Friday, the Hazelwood power station will close after 52 years, its deafening hum silent, its boilers cooling, its eight stacks idle, its gigantic dredges ceasing to dig coal around the clock. Most of the workforce will be gone too.



Whatever the international urgency of climate change and the imperative to move away from burning coal, and whatever the confusion around energy policy in Canberra, and whatever the real reasons for Hazelwood’s owners in France and Japan announcing the plant’s closure five months ago, there is sadness in the valley. There’s a bittersweet nostalgia for a way of life passing, and a fear about what’s to come.



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Has there ever been a folksong serenading a power station, let alone the “dirtiest” one, a hulking, badly maintained relic that has the dubious claim of having the highest emissions intensity of any plant in the country? There is now. Musician and station worker Danny Boothman, 54 and about to be unemployed, has recorded The Hazelwood Song:

So let’s all have a drink to Hazelwood Lift your glasses high Let’s have a drink to Hazelwood It’s sad to watch the old girl die.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Hazelwood Song

Other coal-fired power stations have closed in Australia, but none as big or as symbolic as Hazelwood. The workers will gather for lunch on Friday in the car park, and have hired an AC/DC cover band. On their private Facebook page, they joke about what might be the perfect song to belt out: Dirty Deeds, perhaps, or High Voltage? There are rumours that bagpipes will play the workers out of the gate for the last time.

Mark Richards is 46, and has worked at Hazelwood since he was offered a coveted traineeship with the old government State Electricity Commission (SEC) when he was just 17. His father Geof worked in the industry all his life, starting at Hazelwood and retiring 15 years ago from Yallourn. Those with jobs in the power industry have been the lucky ones, and their luck has kept the grocery stores, hairdressers, newsagents and car yards afloat. There are 450 direct employees at the Hazelwood station and mine, and about 250 contract workers. Their wages have been pumping more than $100m into the local economy each year.

Richards is now a unit controller, a senior job he compares to an airline pilot. He keeps his boiler and a turbine going – one of eight in the station - adjusting the controls if needed, watching out for faults or dangers. It will be strange walking in for his last shift, and stranger still to hear the noisy plant silent. “It will be eerie,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Richards in Morwell. Main photograph: Paul Robinson at the power station. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian

His final shift finishes at 7am Saturday morning – April Fool’s Day, he notes with a grimace. I meet him for dinner in Morwell, a town of 14,000 people just a few hundred metres from the giant open-cut coalmine. The eight stacks of the adjacent power station loom over Morwell, visible from almost anywhere. Eventually the stacks will be demolished and many people can’t quite believe it. Most were expecting a staged closure, the shutting of a few units at a time over a number of years, with enough breathing space to plan.



Hazelwood's closure was inevitable. So where was the transition plan? | Gay Alcorn Read more

He orders a beer and a huge meal called a Bogan Parma. He’s the CFMEU delegate at Hazelwood – it’s a voluntary job – and his phone is always on. The last few months have been frantic. On his wrist, Richards wears, along with his Fitbit, a beyondblue band, “so if I see anyone who’s desperate I can give it to them. Wives have said to me things like ‘my husband says he’s worth more dead than alive.’”

Bloodline

Morwell already has an unemployment rate of 20%, even before Hazelwood workers join the dole queue. By any measure, from health to life expectancy, from education to crime, it is among the most disadvantaged towns in Australia. The other towns of the valley – Traralgon, Moe and Churchill – are also struggling, particularly with unemployment, but Morwell is hurting more.

For generations, coal has been the valley’s lifeblood. Brown coal, too moist and volatile to export but very cheap to burn, was discovered in the valley in 1873. The towns grew up around them. The state government has an ambitious renewable energy target, but today, the valley’s four power stations still provide around 85% of Victoria’s energy needs. Hazelwood is the oldest and biggest, alone producing about a quarter of the Victoria’s electricity, and 5% of the country’s.

You don’t mention climate change in this town Wendy Farmer

Not all of the workers will be unemployed on Friday – the company says 135 will stay on, as well as about 100 contractors. There’s work to “decommission” the station, cleaning it up, removing asbestos, demolishing it and eventually rehabilitating the mine, perhaps by filling it with water to create a lake. Over time, those jobs will disappear.

The rumours that Hazelwood was about to shut have been so regular for so many years that many people shrugged when they heard the latest. So when Hazelwood’s owners, Engie, announced in November that it was shutting the plant and mine, it still came as a shock. Since then, there has been lots of bad news, but at least one piece of good news. The CFMEU’s construction arm is criticised for its behaviour on building sites, but out here, a worker transfer scheme was the union’s idea.



It will mean that redundancies will be offered to workers in the valley’s three other stations – Yallourn, Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B. The idea is that older workers will take a package – funded in part by the state government – to make way for younger workers from Hazelwood to move across. As many as 150 jobs could be saved this way and it offers hope, even if the details are far from sorted and only one company, AGL, has so far signed on. Engie, which owns Loy Yang B as well as Hazelwood, has agreed in principle.



Richards will apply when the scheme opens, but “being a unionist I might not be on the list, who knows”. His parents are elderly and unwell, which makes making a decision hard. “I’d love to stay in the area,” he says. “Originally I was looking to pack up and go overseas for work because the work is overseas – you have to go to the Middle East, secondly maybe India, and China as a last resort. But with my parents I really don’t want to go, so I might just hang around a bit.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jason Sumner in his home in Traralgon East with wife Jesse. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian

There are all sorts of rumours in the valley, all kinds of resentments. The workers are angry at the announcement by Engie that the average payout would be $330,000, a fortune for most of the valley’s people. Richards points out that the figure is skewed because some workers close to retirement have been at Hazelwood for decades, and it includes long service and holiday leave. Contractors receive no redundancy at all.

Salaries, including penalty rates for shift and weekend work, are healthy by average standards, and many workers are well over 50. Rob Dugan, the production manager of the mine, says the average age of his workforce is 51, and the average length of service is 25 years. People get a job, and stay.

“They’ve never had to go for another job, so with some of the age groups, like the 40 to 50 year olds that have to continue to work, it’s very daunting for them.”

There are scores of younger men (there are very few women at the plant) who will be out of work in a region with already high unemployment.

Everyone has a coal story. The local newsagent Ray Burgess, who is still fighting an 11th hour battle to keep Hazelwood open for a few more years, once worked as a scientist for the SEC. Lindsay Mills’ industrial laundry cleans the dirty work wear from the power stations. He took a redundancy package from Yallourn more than 20 years ago to start his business from scratch.

Jason Sumner, 31, is a big man with a full red beard, and he’s just woken up from night shift at Hazelwood. He’s an electrician by trade, a coal and ash operator at the station, helping manage the bunkers before the coal is fed into the boilers. He has been doing the job for two-and-half years and will get 13 weeks’ redundancy pay, a little over $20,000.

Sumner is frustrated because he took the job at a time when Engie was assuring workers that Hazelwood would be around until at least 2025. He and his wife, Jess, grew up in the valley, and moved back to work and live close to their families. They bought a house last year in a leafy street in Traralgon, 20 minutes from Morwell, and worry they could lose it if Jason can’t find work quickly.



It’s a vulnerability … it’s just about feeling like you’ve been smashed around for so long Kellie O'Callaghan

“I was devastated, it’s taken my career out from under me,” he says. “It’s pretty scary really. Small businesses, everybody’s trying pretty hard, but there’s less money going around now, and a lot of skilled people are going to have to leave the area in search of work.”

Sumner is aware of the argument that coal-fired power stations will inevitably close as a result of climate change, and he doesn’t dismiss it. “Look I care, I definitely care. I don’t disagree eventually Hazelwood should have been closed down, but it shouldn’t be closed down without replacing it.

“Without Hazelwood, it’s been made pretty clear that the stability of the electricity market or grid really isn’t going to be very secure. There’s been no planning.”



That’s a common view. Coal-fired power stations, especially the old ones, are going to close, so why hasn’t this been planned for? Why react when they fall over? People in the valley feel they are paying the price for politics and the lack of clear policy.



Mayor Kellie O’Callaghan’s dad Gus worked for the Yallourn station and she remembers as a kid meeting him at the gate after his shift.



O’Callaghan was born in Morwell and is now the mayor of Latrobe city. On her Twitter feed, she’s been counting down the days until Hazelwood closes and she doesn’t shy away from taking a swipe at the state government.



Tony Abbott backs calls to keep Hazelwood power plant open Read more

“[Treasurer] Tim Pallas we have called your office daily. Won’t meet with us to discuss decentralisation 2 assist Latrobe City. Why?” she tweeted last month. And: “What about Latrobe? All we have are promises. Where are the jobs?”



O’Callaghan says the council knew last year that Hazelwood’s closure was imminent, but governments, state and federal, didn’t respond in a serious way until it was announced.



“When the announcement happened, and it was total closure and they set a date, there was no window to do much. It literally for the community felt like the bottom fell out of it.”



At an Engie community consultation meeting a fortnight ago, one man let fly: “I hope everybody here wakes up to that fact, because that’s what it’s going to be like, it’s going to hit like a sledgehammer.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rob Dugan, a worker at Hazelwood mine. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian

The feelings are so deep, and the wariness so great, because of the privatisation of Victoria’s electricity industry in the 1990s. The wisdom of privatisation is now being seriously questioned, but at the time it seemed like easy money. The Victorian premier Jeff Kennett was saddled with a big state debt and received $23bn for breaking up the old SEC and selling it off.



The valley saw little of it. About 15,000 jobs disappeared. The region fell into deep recession, housing prices collapsed, and crime and drug abuse rose. It took at least a decade to crawl its way back out of the slump and O’Callaghan says the community fears the same will happen again. “It’s a vulnerability … it’s just about feeling like you’ve been smashed around for so long.”



O’Callaghan hasn’t given up on brown coal; few in the valley have. There is 500 years worth of it under their feet, and the idea of leaving it there – as climate change scientists say needs to happen if we are to avoid dangerous warming of the planet – is for most, unimaginable.



Myriad ideas to do something else with brown coal have amounted to little so far. A $90m scheme, funded by the federal and Victorian governments, has stalled, with two out of three projects to receive taxpayer money to develop new ideas shelved. One remains: a plan to produce fertiliser and other products in the valley.



Still, the council’s transition plan insists that brown coal remains the key to the area’s future. It wants the state and federal governments to establish “one of the world’s first zero emission brown coal power-generating facilities” in the valley, and it backs carbon capture and storage. “The richness and versatility of this resource cannot be left to languish,” it says.



It wants government departments to relocate to the valley, as much to send a signal to a nervous population that governments believe in their future. It wants better and faster rail to slash commuter times to Melbourne. There might be new industries in building components for the renewable energy sector, using the valley’s skills for manufacturing in rail and other projects. And it’s not ready to give up on brown coal. O’Callaghan doesn’t want the mine filled with water, because that would make the coal unusable forever. Let’s wait, she says, let’s see.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patrick Fleming, dredge driver. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

People power

Mostly, people want someone in government to make a decision.



“At some point, someone has to tell us: is it coal? How long is it coal for and if it’s not coal, when will that change? When your whole community and industry has revolved around coal ... if someone wants to step back and relinquish that, we need to know what the timing is. [Governments] need to make some decisions and give us some guidance, and we’ll be on it.”



Wendy Farmer set up community group Voices of the Valley after the Hazelwood mine caught fire in 2014, spewing coal dust and ash across the town for 45 days. She can imagine a future beyond coal, but knows she is a minority. “You don’t mention climate change in this town, you don’t,” she laughs.

She says, too, that “coal is in our blood”, a psychological as much as an economic dependence. Her husband, Brett, has worked at the Hazelwood mine for a quarter of a century and this week will take a redundancy package at the age of 57.

Farmer doesn’t pretend to be an expert, but she suggests that, with the valley’s transmission infrastructure and skilled workforce, perhaps it could play a role in the development of renewable energy, perhaps manufacturing wind turbines, or being a centre for large-scale storage. “We have to stop thinking that our only asset is coal. Our asset here is the people, it’s the community, and we have to start thinking about what we can do differently.”

It was the mine fire that politicised Farmer – before that, she says, she never questioned the health impacts of living so close to a coalmine. She never thought much about politics at all, barely knowing which party she would vote for until she turned up at a polling booth.



She quit her job to focus on Voices of the Valley. She agitates, and it was her small group’s work that was central to the reopening of the mine fire inquiry, specifically to look at rehabilitation of the mine, and the health impacts of the fire.



She has had pushback from a community that believes in coal – more than once, people tell me that her group are “nutters” and that closing Hazelwood will make little difference to global warming, anyhow. Farmer receives nasty emails attacking her for daring to question the role of the power stations.



Brett has put up with some flak at his work at Hazelwood, too. “We don’t talk about it a lot because I think it hurts too much,” she says. “When you have a loss there’s always blame and there’s always anger and I’m an easy scapegoat. I’m not saying that I don’t sit at my computer at night and cry my eyes out sometimes, but it’s the people who say ‘thank you for standing up for what is right’ that keep me going.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abby Mills in Morwell. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian

Amid it all, there is the optimism of youth. Three weeks ago, Abbie Mills, 28, opened Vault, a restaurant and bar in Church Street in Morwell. Walk down the street and it’s a shock – there are five empty shops for lease or for sale, one after another. Mills was on the brink of deciding to open her restaurant when Hazelwood announced it would shut.



“I did have a week or two when I thought, nah, I’m not going to do it,” she says. “It was very negative, a lot of people were saying, ‘it’s just going to ruin the valley’.” Even her brother, Brendan, said she was crazy. He was working at Hazelwood as a contract worker at the time, and has now left to search for work. He travels to a job in Pakenham, an hour’s drive each way.



The Hazelwood transition deal gives my wife and me a future in our hometown | Mark Richards Read more

Mills renovated the restaurant in bright blue and white and so far, though she’s working 16-hour days, it’s going well. “I thought Morwell needed something and people still need to eat,” she says.



This is conservative, National party country, but some will give Daniel Andrews’ government credit for, as Mark Richards says, “putting its money where its mouth is”. So far, it’s committed $266m as a rescue package for the valley. From that, $85m will be spent on new sports and recreation facilities.



It has established the Latrobe Valley Authority to help workers retrain and to coordinate bureaucracies to ease red tape. The valley has been designated the country’s first “health zone” to try to improve people’s health, and low-income people can get up to $4,500 to upgrade energy efficiency in their homes, such as installing solar panels. If there’s a gripe, it is that people desperately want to see real industries and long-term employment, but it’s far more than the Kennett government offered when it privatised the power industry.



Businesses that relocate to the valley can have state taxes, such as stamp duty, waived. And businesses that put on unemployed workers will get cash incentives, too. Mills is likely to benefit from that. “It will help me a lot,” she says.

Mills’s father Lindsay has been out looking for new business. He runs an industrial laudromat, and the bulk of the business is cleaning the power stations’ dirty work wear. Hazelwood accounts for 22% of the business, and it’s about to dry up. The impact of the closure trickles through the valley, everywhere you look. Mills was “born and bred” in Morwell, and he is stoic. “Morwell will survive,” he says, “how we will, we don’t know yet.”

First, there’s Hazelwood to farewell. In the past few weeks, Engie has been taking journalists through it for one last tour. The control room looks like a museum piece, because it is, all mint green and much of it still manually operated. The plant could be the setting for an end-of-the-world movie – greasy, a maze of pipes and turbines, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. It’s kind of beautiful, a relic of another age.

Most people in the valley will be sad to see it go. Some would like the power plant turned into a tourist attraction, because in 20 years or so, nothing like it will exist. Engie says it’s so run down it would be too dangerous. The plan is to pull it down, piece by piece, but that is years away.

There’s little room for nostalgia. Engie, majority owned by the French government, is getting out of coal across the globe. It doesn’t see a future in it, and will concentrate on renewable energy instead. So it will be left to Danny Boothman to sing the Old Girl out.

So as the dredges stop, the fires go out, the turbines cease to spin We’ll all have to deal with the winds of change As the winds are blowing again.



