The idea was practical to its core. As early as 1909 the government had set aside land on the Brunswick River for a future water supply, but it was Councillor W. E. Selwood who saw the elegant double-use: dam Wilsons Creek for drinking water, and run that same water through tunnels and pipes to spin turbines on the way down. In 1922 the community agreed to combine the two purposes, and the engineer William Corin - who had reported on the Snowy River scheme and would later have a Canberra dam named after him - designed the complex. The weir holds around 25 million litres, serving the town's taps and its power house from a single source - drinking water and electricity drawn from the same dammed creek. Water still runs from the weir down a 440-metre race, originally cut as an earthen channel and later lined in concrete, to reach the machines below.

Mullumbimby Municipal Council switched on official supply from Wilsons Creek on 6 March 1926. Then the light spread outward across the Northern Rivers, town by town, like a slow dawn: Byron Bay was lit on 12 June, and Bangalow on 3 July of the same year. A single creek in the hills was now powering a string of coastal communities. For a region that had spent the previous decades clearing rainforest and shipping butter and timber to the world, generating its own electricity from falling water was a remarkable act of self-sufficiency - a small town deciding it need not wait for the city to bring it into the modern age.

Inside the power house sits a rare collection of working history. Two GEC Pelton wheel turbines - the kind that catch a jet of high-pressure water on spoon-shaped buckets - are among only a handful known to survive anywhere in the world in their original setting. As the town grew, the scheme could not rely on water alone, and diesel engines were added in 1941, 1949, and 1952: a 200-horsepower Ruston Lincoln and two Mirrlees Ricardo engines of 333 and 495 horsepower still stand in the building. Overhead travelling cranes, valves, steel pipes, and a catalogued collection of tools complete a near-intact snapshot of how a small power station actually ran a century ago.

The Lavertys Gap scheme generated for the Northern Rivers until it was decommissioned in 1990, a working life of more than six decades. It tells a quiet story about how the lights came on in country Australia: built and run by the town's own municipal council, the station marks the transition from local councils and private companies to the larger county councils that eventually took over electricity supply. In 2014 it was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register, recognised for its rarity, its largely preserved appearance, and its catalogued collection of working machinery surviving in its original setting. The steel power house still stands in its green gully, an imposing industrial silhouette against the forest, and the people who once worked it hold it dear. A century on from the night it first lit Mullumbimby, the creek that powered three towns has earned its rest, and its protection.