Reader\'s Digest Australia - 07.2019

Queen Wilhelmina saved

windmills from disappearing in the

Netherlands some 70 years ago.

Now the craft of milling

is coming back, too

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL ROBERT

Saving

A LOST

CRAFT

CULTURE

“I HAD NEVER BEEN INTERESTED in

windmills,” Jan Suurmond tells me,

smiling across the wooden kitchen

table inside De Onrust windmill.

Suurmond, 63, is one of three vol-

unteer millers who operate De On-

rust, one of the last active polder

mills in the Netherlands. Until last

century, thousands of windmills

like this one controlled groundwater

levels in polders, the low-lying land

reclaimed from the sea, lakes, and

tidal regions and protected by dikes.

“For me, windmills were part of

94 | July• 2019