Blinman Mine

It looks a lot like a lunar landscape and thatís probably how it seemed to those miners who first ventured this far North last century. They came to Blinman in the Flinders Ranges to mine copper after a shepherd named Robert Blinman first discovered an exposed outcrop while tending his sheep. By 1859 heíd pegged his lease and later sold the mining rights for seventy thousand pounds to the Yudnamutana Mining Company, a London based company with extensive operations in the Flinders. These days its a lot quieter and of course you can do the guided tour. The siteís caretaker, Irving Cains takes tours by appointment. Or you can obtain a key from the Blinman General Store and head underground on your own into some of the early shafts which were dug soon after the mine began operation in 1862. These upper levels were opened right to the surface and you can see by the width here a considerable amount of ore was removed from here. And how far down does it go? About five hundred feet from where we are now. A total of ten thousand tons of copper metal was produced here from more than two hundred thousand tonnes of ore. And extracting that much material was no mean feat, given the laborious process involved. What you can see here is evidence of the drill hole and what is left there is the section of the drill hole and the area here the cavity that you can see is what is known as the butt and that area there is where the explosive charge was initiated and the amount of the material that was removed would have been from here to there. So it took a fair bit of work to get in this far? It was very slow process in the days of black powder blasting. Twelve to eighteen inches was the most that could be done in anyone round.

And so they inched their way along a one hundred and sixty metre seam for the next forty years. I think the search for mineral wealth in the early stages of the colony attracted a lot of people to toil away in these ventures. In its heyday up to three hundred people were employed here in what was the biggest producer in the Flinders Ranges. Fluctuating copper prices and the tyranny of distance meant these shafts often lead to despair with several companies failing to make a go of the Blinman Mine. It was very rich in ore body but unfortunately due to the high transport costs and having to ship all the ore two hundred kilometres from here to Port Augusta, before the days of the railway, the Great Northern Railway, it sent several companies into liquidation because of high transport costs. By 1907 it was all over, leaving a series of tunnels for the intrepid Flinders traveller to explore. The Department of Primary Industry and Resources SA now manages the site as an historic reserve and has plans to drive a tunnel twenty metres North into the existing adit to open hidden shafts first dug in the 1860s. Irving Cains takes tours by appointment for $5 per person and can be contacted pm (08) 8648 4874.

For details on accommodation at the Blinman Hotel, please click here.

For more information you can email: info@postcards.sa.com.au