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As most of the world struggles with record electricity prices and the spectre of an unreliable energy supply, there are some folk who remain unaffected, living off-grid in the Victorian bush.
They have mastered keeping the lights on while overcoming the big challenges of bush life, such as fire, flood, drought and isolation. Self-sufficiency requires strength, resilience and the ability to improvise.
Jill Redwood at her Goongerah property. Credit: Rachel Mounsey/The Age
But how and why do people choose to live off-grid, especially in old age? To ask this question, The Age visited a group of Victorians living self-sufficiently in rural East Gippsland.
Jill Redwood’s first bush hut at Coopers Creek, near Walhalla in Gippsland, was a rough shack leftover from the gold rush. She was in her 20s, and while the world around her hummed to a ’70s beat, Redwood moved to her own.
“I hated what was happening to the natural world,” she says. “I didn’t want to be part of the human machine.”
Jill Redwood outside one of her vegetable patches on her Goongerah property in East Gippsland. Credit: Rachel Mounsey/The Age
At a young age, Redwood decided she wanted a little place of her own in the bush with animals and a garden.
Now in her mid-60s, she’s sitting in the kitchen of her self-built slab log cabin in Goongerah with a bowl of home-grown raspberries, goats milk and muesli. Classical music is playing on the radio powered by solar panels.
She’s lived here for 40 years. Half her day is spent feeding her animals, working the garden, composting and “getting some wood in for the night”. The remaining hours go into her campaign to save the Gippsland forests.
Redwood is a well-known environmentalist but activism these days requires reliable computer access. She scans the laptop screen in front of her, keeping tabs on an important campaign she is helping run.
Redwood gets up, collects her broom and sweeps the floor. “A real floor, you know?” Rather than the dirt one she had in her first hut, when the water came via buckets from Coopers Creek, and lighting was from candles and kerosene lamps. Tank water, solar pumps and panels are a modern luxury.
Isn’t she worried about getting older out here?
“You’ve just gotta keep up your stamina,” she says. “There’s always something that needs to be done. I don’t work like I’m 30 anymore, and so I just adapt to things taking a bit longer.”
The tablet on the kitchen table dings – probably an update on the campaign.
Redwood says she’s more worried about the planet’s future than her own. “I’ll be planted here,” she says. “I’d rather live in a hollow log than a townhouse.”
John Hermans at his homemade refuelling station. Credit: Rachel Mounsey/The Age
John Hermans backs his campervan up to his homemade refuelling station. Nestled among gum trees at Clifton Creek near Bairnsdale, the scene is like a 1970s sci-fi, with a pump hooked up to a makeshift machine. But there’s no petrol in the pump – the car runs on vegetable oil.
“I haven’t been to a real bowser in about 15 years,” Hermans says.
One of Gippsland’s off-grid groundbreakers, the 64-year-old and his 63-year-old wife, Robyn, have been self-sufficient for more than 40 years.
They started bush life in a corrugated iron shack. Twelve years and two kids later, they moved into a compressed-earth house made from materials from their own property.
“We never had a bank loan, never had a debt,” says Hermans. “So we just progressed along with what we could when we could.”
For more than 20 years, the family’s main energy source was micro-hydropower from the nearby river. When the river began to dry up – Hermans blames clear-fell logging upstream – they moved to solar.
Everything is secondhand or recycled, even the solar panels, inverters and batteries. “I was at the scrapyard, just two weeks ago, and I bought 45 solar panels for a dollar a kilo.”
Hermans has thrived in the bush from constantly innovating, fine-tuning and self-educating. It’s important to be more efficient, he says. The couple have no plans to leave Clifton Creek.
“I’m using old solar panels because I know that they’ll work at a level totally acceptable for me … for another 10 or 20 years.”
Many nights are spent on YouTube, picking up tips from others living off-grid. The next goal is to replace the vegetable-oil van with a high-efficiency, solar-electric vehicle charged by his solar power. “It [vegetable oil] is almost as bad as petroleum itself, right?”
A love of brumbies and the mountains along the Snowy River drew the then-70-year-old Keith Bradshaw and his lifetime friend, Nancy, to a life in the hills near McKillops Bridge in far east Victoria 20 years ago.
Horseman Keith Bradshaw in his McKillops Bridge home. Credit: Rachel Mounsey/The Age
Living off-grid had never really occurred to them before. But to live way up in the hills, miles from anywhere, living off-grid was really the only option.
In the kitchen of his mud brick house, Bradshaw, now 90, puts the kettle on his combustion stove and looks around the home he describes as “comfortable enough”.
He grew up in East Bentleigh, in south-east Melbourne, in the 1940s and remembers life without electricity.
“We had lamps and candles, you know, so I was quite used to that. Poor Mum, she raised six of us without solar power,” he says.
Keith Bradshaw soaking up the afternoon sun in his off-grid house in McKillops Bridge. Credit: Rachel Mounsey/The Age
Bradshaw says his hillside home – full of photos of race-winning horses and other horse memorabilia, including a collection of bridles and faded Driza-Bone riding coats – is luxurious by comparison.
A solar-powered old car radio sits on the kitchen table, where a newspaper lays open at the racing pages.
Nancy had a stroke a few months after moving to McKillops Bridge and was moved into care at nearby Delegate. But after a partial recovery, she insisted on returning to her new home to give it a try.
The nurses who cared for Nancy didn’t think Bradshaw could care for her on his own. But for five years, the two “battled on” alone in the bush.
Keith Bradshaw and one of his horses. Credit: Rachel Mounsey/The Age
“She was happy as hell here. And she was very grateful, you know?” Bradshaw says.
Nancy died 15 years ago, and Bradshaw has lived alone in McKillops Bridge ever since.
He spends his mornings tending to his horses and lazy afternoons stretched on a banana lounge in his sunroom. At night, he watches the trots on his solar-powered, satellite TV.
Bradshaw says he will stay here, come what may, and he wouldn’t leave “for quids”, especially without his horses.
Brian and Elizabeth Blakeman at Wairewa. Credit: Rachel Mounsey/The Age
Elizabeth and Brian Blakeman, Wairewa
Friends living off-grid inspired Elizabeth and Brian Blakeman to build their rock house at Wairewa, near Nowa Nowa, 32 years ago. It was also a practical move, given they’d chosen to live a long way from mains power.
Before they moved to Wairewa, the Blakemans ran a sheep farm at Deddick, near the NSW border, so they knew about country living.
But producing their own power was a major challenge at first, 84-year-old Elizabeth says, and there was little information about how to do it.
The couple bought a “primitive” book that outlined the basics of solar power, including the need for an inverter and a battery bank.
Elizabeth giggles at the thought of the dim lighting they lived by at night and how she would have to crank up the generator just to do some vacuuming. “We rapidly decided that was useless.”
Over the years, the Blakemans updated their electricity system, progressing from lead acid to lead gel batteries and now to lithium, and higher wattage solar panels.
Now they flick switches whenever they want. “I use my welder and all sorts of power tools in the shed, and I don’t even have to start the generator,” says 77-year-old Brian.
The couple now count among their household appliances an electric jug, microwave, toaster and even an air conditioner. They even power a baby art gallery set up in a shipping container donated to them after the 2019-20 bushfires. It’s open to the public on Sundays.
But hot water is still a challenge because finding, collecting and cutting firewood to heat water is hard work. So the couple are looking to install a hot water system sometime in coming years.
Otherwise, the Blakemans say life is just fine living off-grid – and they’re not going anywhere.
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