Moonta - In Australia's little Cornwall
with Keith Conlon

Once, a host of stone towers rambled day and night, proclaiming South Australia as the copper kingdom of the world. Now, there is only the sound of the wind and the birds as you look out over the Moonta Mines in the Copper Triangle in Yorke Peninsula. One hundred and forty years ago, the Wallaroo mine began, quickly followed by the Moonta Mining Company.

Looking down from the lookout on the huge Richmans tailings heap, it is difficult to fathom the enormity of it all. The stone engine-house tower of the Richman's crushing plant in the foreground and the distant Hughes chimney and engine-house, were connected by a string of other buildings and shaftheads, tracing the line of the enormous Elder Lode.

The maze of mine tunnels beneath this and other lodes here, would stretch out to reach all the way to Adelaide - more than 160kms away. 1700 men and boys worked at the mine in round-the-clock shifts.

A handsome town for a population of 10,000 also quickly grew, and my Postcards tour began at the gracious, towered, Moonta Town Hall. It is the departure point for two excellent heritage trials - Upstreet Moonta and the longer driving version.

Queen's Square is a pretty picnic area today, and in one corner stands a "meat store". Roach's butcher shop was in business within a couple of years of the Moonta township being surveyed in 1863. Above the trees in the park, a high stone church gable witnesses the predominance of Methodists among the Cornish families who came to the town from the Burra mine or from the depressed south-west of England.

Moonta's George Street has an attractive set of buildings, almost all in local rough stone, from the heady early days of the fabulously rich copper mine. For half-a-century, this was a booming centre with its own horse-tram system.....until the mine closed. Since then, the main streets have been spared the ravages of twentieth-century progress. The Postcards team returned to town later for an obligatory Cornish pasty, but first we did some exploring on the Moonta Mines Trial.

A couple of years ago, Postcards took you aboard the Moonta Tourist Train. It snakes past the ruins of old copper processing plants and through a tunnel under joining tailings dumps, or "Moonta's Himalayas" as they used to be called. As it passes Ryan's Shaft, the guides tell you about the mine's origins. I checked to find water only a few metres down the tree-branch line shaft that is pretty well at the spot where shepherd Patrick Rya,n found a chunk of copper ore in a wombat hole.

What the little memorial stone for Paddy Ryan doesn't mention is that he told not only his boss, landowner Walter Watson Hughes, but also the Pt Wakefield publican. A race to register the mining leases followed and it took years to resolve the dispute between the parties.

There are only glimpses of the great mining operation left at the site, a row of stones here and a fenced off shaft there. A century ago, there was a massive amount of machinery here to raise and treat the ore. One hundred and seventy thousand tonnes of copper was contracted in all. The workshops, for instance, were the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere, employing three hundred men and boys.

In parts, the native scrub has returned to soften the mine area mess. It must have looked like a lunar landscape with a mine on top. I climbed another tailings dump, this one named after the legendary mine manager, Captain Hancock. The ore was crushed to a dusty red sand - at least, that's what was left in giant flat-topped piles of the one-and-a-half million tonnes raised from the tunnel labyrinth beneath.

Below Hancock's Heap, is a survivor of the hundreds of cottages that grew higgledy piggledy between the shaftheads. The Woods family cottage is nurtured by the National Trust, and everything inside and out is as Mrs Woods would like it, except perhaps outside the gate. Fences of closely-tied sticks were common. They kept feral goats out of the garden beds. We gave "camo" Jeff Clayfield a while to shoot some horticultural compositions in a nineteenth-century garden worth a visit in its own right.

Further along the Mine Trial, there is a commanding church that sits at the end of a side road. Its architecture is quaintly rustic, sitting behind a sold iron fence from the famous Martin foundry in Gawler. The Moonta Mines Methodist Church was built in 1865 to replace a hut version. It was one of several in the area, yet it needed a gallery addition soon after to accommodate a congregation of more than 1200.

Slipping back into town for that pasty, we noticed that all that religion did not stop Moonta from having its fair share of pubs. On the town trial, or "Upstreet Moonta" as the Cousin Jacks and Jennies would say, you pass an antique shop in what was once the Prince of Wales Hotel. Cock-fights were held out the back in the early days. Down the block, the Moonta Hotel is still operating. They've both been here since the town began in 1863.

In between, an attractive batch of shops, all with that sense of the solid. Moonta has dozens of buildings all built within two decades - the 1860's and 1870's - and they are in stone and of a size and style that a lot of people love. It makes Moonta a special heritage town.

While the township is very much in evidence, despite its population now running at about one-third of its mining days, back at the mine area, it is more a case of what used to be, and is no longer there. The mighty Hughes Engine-house, several stories high in local stone, and accompanies by its tall round chimney, has been saved. Signage takes you round a heritage trail within a trail. The tower housed a huge Cornish steam engine that pumped water to keep the mines dry.

The Elder lode ran north nearly one kilometre from here - Elder? It was named after the same Sir Thomas Elder who no doubt used some of his incredible dividends from his investment here for his beneficent donations to the Art Gallery, the University Music School and the city - the Elder Park Rotunda.

Add the donation by mine principal Walter Watson Hughes that was so substantial it gave rise to the city's first University, and you can fairly say there's more than a little bit of Moonta in Adelaide.

The boys who worked at the mine did not share in the wealth. They were paid a shilling a week. Many of them, however, went to the new Moonta Mines School when it opened in 1878. Grand and gothic in style, it was designed to take eight hundred students, but enrolments soon rose to more than one thousand. Today, it's a compulsory part of your Moonta education when you visit - it is the National Trust Museum.

On Postcards, we've already visited the Wheat Hughes Mine, just north of the town. It's new tourist operation offers a fascinating glimpse of mining old and new. Moonta has an excellent Visitors Information Centre in the old railway station. And its heritage trails booklet is packed with information that brings the rich history of the town alive.

Moonta is a key to understanding Australia's little Cornwell.

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