Funny how exciting a blackout used to be when you were a kid. One minute you were watching television and the next the screen disappeared, the house went completely dark and everyone started talking at once. Mum went looking for the candles, Dad tried to remember where he’d put the torch, and someone inevitably peered through the curtains to answer the question that apparently mattered most: “Have the neighbours lost theirs too?”
Before long, people were appearing at front gates and calling across fences, trying to work out how far the blackout extended and whether anyone knew what had happened.
There were no phones desperately needing to be charged, no Wi-Fi to lose and no streaming service cutting out halfway through a show. The television was gone, most of the appliances were useless and, for a while at least, the normal routine of the house simply stopped.
For kids, that could turn an ordinary night into an unexpected adventure.
How many of these do you remember?
Every family owned a torch, although its whereabouts seemed to become a mystery precisely when the electricity failed.
Dad would rummage through kitchen drawers, cupboards and the shed while insisting somebody had moved it. Mum usually knew where it was all along. Eventually it would be found and Dad would confidently flick the switch, only to discover that the batteries were flat or so weak they produced a tiny yellow glow that barely reached the other side of the room.
While Dad conducted his search for the torch, Mum generally got on with the practical business of finding the candles and matches.
Soon there were candles sitting in saucers, jars and old holders around the house, and rooms we’d lived in for years suddenly looked completely different.
Naturally, the kids wanted to carry them around. Just as naturally, Mum wasn’t having a bar of that.
Looking out the window was our version of checking the outage map.
If the house next door was dark, you knew it wasn’t just your place. If the entire street had disappeared into blackness, things became much more interesting.
People wandered outside, neighbours called to one another and theories began circulating almost immediately, despite nobody knowing anything more than anyone else.
The fridge suddenly became the most heavily protected object in the house.
“Don’t open the fridge!”
Every parent seemed to know that cold air was precious during a blackout and apparently one child standing there deciding whether they wanted cheese or leftover pudding could jeopardise the family’s entire food supply.
Being told not to open it made you immediately wonder what might be worth eating inside.
Once it became obvious the television wasn’t returning any time soon, somebody would dig out a pack of cards.
Snap, Fish, Euchre and whatever else your family played could keep everyone occupied, while longer blackouts sometimes brought out the board games.
Monopoly was a brave choice. A power failure could be over in an hour; an argument about who owed rent on Mayfair could last until Tuesday.
There was something strange about seeing your own house lit only by candles and torchlight.
Hallways became spooky and shadows grew enormous on the walls, and every noise outside suddenly deserved investigation. Torches inevitably ended up under chins as everyone attempted their best scary face.
If the blackout happened near bedtime, there was also the reasonable argument that nobody could possibly be expected to go to sleep while all this excitement was going on.
This was an important part of the process, despite Dad having no qualifications whatsoever in electricity distribution.
He’d head outside with the torch, inspect the fuse box, look up and down the street and occasionally stare towards the powerlines as though the cause might reveal itself if he looked long enough.
After completing his assessment, he’d come back inside and announce:
“Whole bloody street’s out.”
Thanks, Dad. We’d gathered that.
Without television or much else competing for attention, the family tended to congregate wherever the candles were.
People talked, someone told a story, the kids played cards or mucked around with the torch, and if neighbours dropped in, they stayed for a chat because there wasn’t much point going home to sit in their own dark house.
Nobody described it as family bonding; we were simply passing the time, but some of those nights became memorable.
After a while, somebody would ask how long we’d been sitting in the dark and everyone would produce a different answer.
Dad was certain it had been half an hour, Mum reckoned 20 minutes and the kids felt as though civilisation had collapsed sometime around lunchtime. Then came the discussion about whether somebody should ring the electricity company, followed by the question of who actually had the number.
There was rarely any warning. One moment you were sitting around the table by candlelight and the next the lights came on, the fridge started humming and whatever had been playing on television suddenly reappeared.
“It’s back!” someone would shout, unnecessarily, as every room in the house lit up.
The funny part was that after spending the previous hour waiting for the electricity to return, there could be a little disappointment when it finally did.
The cards were packed away, the candles were blown out and everyone drifted back to what they’d been doing before. For a brief period, though, the usual routine had been interrupted and the whole family had ended up together because there really wasn’t anywhere else to go.
Every family had its own blackout routine. The battery radio might come out if the outage dragged on, somebody worried about everything defrosting in the freezer, and Dad often discovered that the spare batteries he’d been keeping for years had either gone flat or leaked inside the packet.
Summer blackouts were another matter altogether. Without fans or air-conditioning, windows and doors were thrown open and everyone sat around hoping for the slightest breeze.
Where you lived made a difference too. Country families were often more accustomed to outages during storms and bad weather, while people living in cyclone-prone parts of Queensland and the Top End knew losing power could be a serious event rather than a couple of entertaining hours by candlelight.
For plenty of Aussie kids, a short suburban blackout felt like something had happened. The neighbours came outside, the house looked different and for once nobody could simply switch on the television when they became bored.
Probably why so many of us still remember them.
What did your family do when the lights went out?
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