Except for South Australia. I don't know if it was due to termites, lack of hard woods, fireproofing or an excess of steel and concrete but we embed concrete between two steel beams to create the iconic stobie pole which has doomed countless motorists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stobie_pole

Stobie poles are used a lot in Italy and southern Europe. They all seem to be from the 1920s and have really bad "concrete cancer" and the underlying steel is rusting out. Quite picturesque in a "oh crap, there is 220v on top of this rusting pile..." kind of way.

"the prime of miss jean brodie" is set in pre-WWII scotland and an opening credit scene walks past two concrete lamp posts. My mother (who was an architectural historian) leaned over and said "anachronistic: that wasn't introduced until the 1950s" which goes to show fanaticism over street furniture and the poles is deep deep down...

220V isn't very high in the power world. The US has 765 KV. I'm not sure what the highest voltage cable in the world is, but now I'm curious.

There is a transmission system in India rated for something over a million volts. The last time I looked it was only carrying about 800kV, though. Just why this was so was not explained. IIRC it was on the Wikipedia article on transmission grids.

IIRC, my college power professor said that Russian transmission lines carried 1 million volts, whereas US transmission lines only carry half a million volts.

We do have plenty of 500 KV (all over Louisiana and Arkansas for example), but a good bit of 765 as well. It's very costly to get right-of-way and the bigger the installation the more right-of-way you need.

As I understand it one of the largest concerns in AU are the wildfires damaging circuits connecting the disparate grids. There was some conversation about replacing some of the network poles with fire resistant poles in order to try and avoid the high number of outages caused by fires during the dry season.

I'd be interested to know how that project went, and if it was successful.

Not so much bushfires damaging electrical infrastructure as electrical infrastructure starting fires. A large portion of Victoria's worst day of bushfire was sparked by a faulty power line and the electricity distribution network (22kV and below) is responsible for a good portion of fire starts, especially those lines that utilise a single wire with an earth return (SWER). The recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Black Saturday fires in regard to the electricity network are available at http://royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Commission-Reports/Final-R... and contain a whole lot of background information. Suffice to say that the recommendation (27) of the wholesale burying of thousands of kilometres of SWER line at the cost of billions of dollars haven't gone far.

Fire resistance is one of those complicated things. Its not necessarily true that wooden poles are a worse risk than other ones. Steel loses structural integrity under fire heat (ok.. please do not talk about jet fuel and planes...) so for some forms of fire, a wooden pole can survive.

I think most references to fire risk with electricity distribution are actually arguing for underground wiring in the longer term.

Dry season is very much a northern part of australia concern (for now. the dry\wet cycle is moving south quite rapidly). The summer (which is the wet in the north) is when the bush fires happen.

Though from what i recall the NT poles are mostly steel.