Burra and its Monster Mine
with Keith Conlon
On a hill above the town, a lonely stone sentry stands where once an army of Cornish miners dug deep. Once the mine closed, Burra was left with a delightful excess of Victorian era stone shops and premises for the farming centre it became.
On the National Register, Burra is one of the most historic towns in Australia. A century-and-a-half ago, there were only a half dozen towns in the continent that were bigger. Burra was bigger than Perth and Brisbane put together!
A couple of decades back, Market Square and its quaint red-roofed band rotunda starred in the opening scene of the South Australian film success "Breaker Morant". Coming at a time when collectively we were beginning to appreciate our pioneering heritage more, it helped put Burra on the tourist map. Surely, it was on the heritage and mining history map already...five towns, in fact, that rose from nothing to serve the Cornish, Welsh, Germans, Spanish muteleers, Irish bullock drivers and more who came to the Monster Mine.
I walked along Commercial Street's shops and offices, noting they've changed little since the days when they were part of the company town, Kooringa. It was owned by the South Australian Mining Association, or "Sammy" as it was known at the mine. When copper was discovered here in 1845, two syndicates vied for a special survey. The NOBS, colonial men of wealth, looked down on the SNOBS, a collection of cobblers and shopkeepers of Rundle and Hindley Streets. But it was the latter who became copper kings, earning fabulous returns.
Commercial Street was no timber set from the Wild West. In the young Colony's wild north, it was in solid and respectable stone for a town of five thousand people, easily the biggest town outside Adelaide at the time. Just around Market Square itself (actually a rambling triangle), the stories abound. A massive old jinker rests there, built specially to bring a massive cylinder for a beam pump from Port Adelaide. It took forty bullocks about six weeks. Bullock teams often crowded the square and miners spilled out of the old Miners' Arms, now the Burra Hotel.
They may be gone, but a lot of old Burra is intact, and it is accessible via its heritage trails and Passport Tour. Armed with a key and directions from the Visitors Centre in Market Square, I headed for the mine that created it all. "Burra Burra" means "great great" in the language of the Hindustani shepherds who tended sheep along the creek that occasionally earned its name. It was copper-mania that created the Monster Mine that took its name from the nearby watercourse.
Two shepherds found copper sticking out of the ground within a month of each other in 1845. Standing high above the deep open cut, now reclaimed by water to form a long lake, I could see one of the fault lines running down the southern cliff-face. In a great geological lottery, between it and another fault only a couple of hundred metres away, a huge lode of copper had awaited discovery. The SNOBS syndicate drew this find, while the NOBS scored the Princess Royal Mine a few kilometres south. Theirs was a dud. This was the copper bonanza, which injected massive wealth and a big population into South Australia.
As you drive up into the mine works area, you're guided in by the miners' mascot, Johnny Green, atop the Peacock Chimney, rebuilt stone by stone when the modern open-cut of the 1970's began. There are still a few venerable mine buildings scattered round the site. The most impressive is the Jubilee 150 restored Morphett Engine-house, with its museum displays within. Its great beam engine kept the water out of the shafts that went as deep as 183 metres. For more than two decades, until the original operation closed in 1877, it was the heartbeat of the mine.
There were one thousand men and boys working at the Burra mine, four hundred of them underground. For a sense of their conditions, you can again walk through a tunnel that joins up with the Morphett shaft. Long gone, however, are the brilliant "flower gardens" below, as the Cornish miners called them. There are samples of the vivid green malachite and stunning blue azurite that inspired them in the Morphett Engine-house.
Only a couple of hours drive from Adelaide, Burra is a great living museum of mining and nineteenth century history. There are a string of monuments, ruins and museums along its Heritage Passport trail. On the rise north of the main town and the mine, the old Redruth Gaol was another featured location in Breaker Morant. These days they give you a key to get in!! Its walled exercise yards and cells opening onto them are very much like they were when the prison became the first outside Adelaide in 1856. It is a grim thought that after forty years as a jail, it took in wayward young ladies. It was a girls reformatory 'til the 1920's.
Why Redruth Gaol and not Burra Gaol? In the 1850's, Burra was actually five different towns. Redruth was a government-surveyed town to the north, and so it housed the jail, the old police station and stables. It was a Cornish village in the main. There was also a Welsh enclave, and Aberdeen was attached to the failed Bon Accord mine just outside the Burra mine boundary. High on the hill, and English-style village, Hampton, is now just ruins, all ghostly quiet.
The Welshmen came to work the smelters for the mine. There's a sidewalk off the main driving trail that the Postcards team would recommend. A couple of kangaroos watched us pick our way through crumbling ruins where one thousand men once worked.
Burra sits along a creek surrounded by hills bared by woodcutters that fed the furnaces of the mine and smelters. We took panoramic shots from above the town and mused that it was a nice accident that copper was discovered here close to the edge of farming country. If it had been located only a few kilometres further east in arid sheep-station territory, it may have been a crumbling ghost town by now.
It was anything but in the 1840's. There were so many Cornish miners that nearly two thousand people lived in "dugouts" - homes cut into the creek banks. With typical humour, the "cousin Jacks and Jennies" called them "palaces in the creek". There are a handful left in a tributary in the town, and the Passports Key gets you in for an underground visit. Sadly, the swarm of children who lived in the creek died in terrible numbers through disease.
The mine company "Sammy", built the first company housing in Australia to help house more families, and now they're restored for very well patronised family tourist accommodation. Another small museum in one of the row cottages gets the vote as a must-see among many in Burra. Malowen Lowarth looks like its Cornish family have just gone "upstreet", and Cousin Marj acts as if she's stayed back to keep the home fires burning.
From the cottages, the trail heads a few metres across the historic bridge over Burra Creek and back into Market Square. There's a pretty lake and picnic ground by the Caravan Park to give the kids a chance to run and feed the ducks. It gave the team a picturesque finishing point for an epic Postcards hosting spot.
Burra is certainly one of our most distinctive and attractive heritage towns, with an excellent team of people to make your stay and touring memorable.
Details:
For More information on Burra you can contact:
Burra Visitors Centre
2 Market Square, Burra SAThey have all the details on accommodation, tours, restaurants and attractions.
Phone 08 8892 2154 Fax 08 8892 2555 or email bvc@capri.net.au
