Port Augusta mayor Joy Baluch fights pollution from city's biggest industry: coal-fired power stations
Joy Baluch, long-time mayor of Port Augusta, with the city's former coal-fired power stations in the background.
Photo courtesy Geocaching
Joy Baluch, Port Augusta’s mayor 1981-93 and 1995-2013, was a strong fighter for her city, including campaigning during her Australian record term of 29 years for solar-thermal technology to replace the city’s biggest industry: its coal-fired power stations.
Port Augusta-born Joy Baluch (nee Copley) worked as head stenographer for the mechanical engineering branch of Commonwealth Railways 1949-53 before becoming owner of the Pampas Motel from 1961. Elected to Port Augusta City Council in 1970, she became mayor in 1981 and led successful efforts to ban drinking in public places and a night-time curfew to reduce violence.
She became involved in local politics because of her son’s severe asthma that she blamed on the ash from lowest-quality Leigh Creek lignite coal burnt at the city’s the power stations. That ash was dumped on the city 60 years, at the level of 15 tonnes a day in the early years. A belated study of lung cancer rates in Port Augusta showed double the average rate but the state government tried to blame it on smoking.
Baluch’s husband, who worked in the power stations, died of lung cancer 16 years before her, though he didn’t smoke. Baluch died in 2013 but her daughter Lisa Lumsden took over her fight in 2011 for solar thermal technology to replace the city’s ageing coal-fired electricity generators, although conscious of its 200 jobs.
Community group Repower Port Augusta saw that, with climate change, dirty coal ash and a 60-year-old power station, change was inevitable. The power station was shut down in 2016.
Repower Port Augusta did research and found solar thermal technology was exactly suited to the city’s environment. Its local campaign went state-wide then national. This started a clutch of renewables projects around the city,
A bridge that carries National Highway One across Spencer Gulf was named after her in 2012.