Just under a week before Christmas, when people in other parts of Australia are basking in the sun, we had to rug up to go for a walk.

This is such a breezy corner of the world and when it blows from the south, as it did yesterday, it feels as if the icy winds are blasting straight from Antarctica.

Some friends who live on a hill, about a 10-minute drive from here, sometimes feel a little unnerved when the northerlies blow across the pastures below and slam into their house. When that happens, they’re grateful that the roof has twice as many screws holding it down than originally planned.

To produce electricity they have a small wind generator, augmented by solar panels, and such is the power output from these, they can easily live off the grid.

I guess elevation might have something to do with the roaring gales that sweep through the region. The hill we live on is about 450 metres above sea level, by no means the highest point in this locale.

Another reason for the strong winds is that so many trees in the area were cut down to make way for gold digging, grazing and crops, and timber from the Wombat Forest was heavily harvested until fairly recently.

Farmers had the right idea when they planted trees to form windbreaks to protect their animals, crops and homes from the onslaught. Of course the trees have to be protected, too, from the animals.

In my post ‘Farming the Wind’, I talked about a proposed community-owned wind farm, to be located near Daylesford. Leonards Hill was chosen as the site for the wind farm because it has strong, consistent winds.

According to Hepburn Wind’s share offer document, Sustainability Victoria’s Wind Atlas rates Leonards Hill as being at the upper end of the Victorian wind regime, with an average wind speed over 12 months of 7.7 metres per second at a hub height of 69 metres. (The hub height is the distance from the ground to the center-line of the turbine rotor.)

Following strong winds here, I used to think that news reports the next day would feature stories about the aftermath of the damage: torn-off roofs, flattened crops, uprooted trees. Usually, though, there’s nothing  more than light debris on the roads and the occasional fallen tree.

On the way to dinner with friends one night, we had to stop to clear the road of a tree brought down during a Summer storm, making us about 15 minutes late. It’s not a bad excuse, really, and it’s a great conversation-starter. Everyone around here has at least one fallen-tree story.

As for the proposed wind farm, when the share offer closed on 12 December, over 630 people had invested about $3.4 million in the project and the State Government had chipped in around $1 million. Sadly, the total fell considerably short of the $10 million needed to build the two turbines.

On days such as this, I can’t help thinking that so much of the wind is going to waste.