Home Hill Powerhouse  Home Hill Powerhouse is a heritage-listed power station at First Avenue, Home Hill, Shire of Burdekin, Queensland, Australia. It was built from to 1922. It is also known as Inkerman Irrigation Area Power House. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 2 August 2004. The Home Hill Powerhouse, a substantial brick and corrugated iron structure located in First Avenue, Home Hill, was completed in 1922 as part of the Inkerman Irrigation Area Scheme. At the time it was the largest powerhouse in North Queensland, supplying power for irrigation purposes to the farmers (mainly sugar cane growers) on the Inkerman Estate until 1953. The Inkerman Repurchased Estate, formerly part of Inkerman Station, was opened for selection on 8 December 1911, principally as sugar-growing land. Easy terms encouraged many people with little or no farming experience to take up blocks, and within a year, many of the 500 families who had settled at Inkerman had exhausted their limited capital and were heavily in debt. One drought convinced them that irrigation was essential, but few could afford to irrigate with individual pumping plants. In January 1913 the Inkerman Farmers and Graziers Association began lobbying the Queensland Government for the provision of a government-subsidised irrigation scheme for their district, modeled on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme in New South Wales, which utilised a central powerhouse to supply power to irrigation pumps on surrounding farms. In February 1913 the Assistant Engineer of the Water Supply Department, HEA Eklund, visited Ayr to report on the proposal. Eklund determined that there was adequate water beneath most Inkerman farms, and supported the idea of a communal irrigation scheme, which would be the first of its kind in North Queensland. Eklund calculated that a central powerhouse could serve 135 farms of an average size of . Although his initial estimate at was rejected as too costly, this was revised in 1915 to as more people settled in the area. However, the costs now were spread across more farms, Eklund estimating the cost of power at less than a penny per unit, far cheaper than the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, which then was less than a sixth the size of that proposed for Home Hill. In May 1915 Queensland's first secure Labor government took office. Under the leadership of Premier T. J. Ryan and sponsoring a policy of State capitalism, the new Queensland Labor Government set about acquiring State enterprises. In July 1916 the Inkerman irrigation scheme was approved.