Glen Osmond Mines: Glen Osmond, in the Adelaide Foothills.

A fashionable suburb it is today, but 160 years ago Cornish miners carved a place for Glen Osmond in Australian history. The major intersection now called the Gateway to Adelaide is also the front door to the Glen Osmond mines. The most obvious sign of underground work is just metres from the Old Tollgate in the hills freeway.

In a pocket handkerchief park, the mine entrance looks considerably prettier than it was in the 1840s. As it happens, the horizontal tunnel behind the iron grille is authentic enough, but Wheal Augusta went nowhere, and soon closed. The hillside suburban creep has all but swallowed the remains of a half dozen producing lodes of silver-lead ore. Tunnels were dug in search of a lode or crevice between bluestone blocks (up to 1 ½ m wide) running up through the steep hillsides. Some of the miners did well enough, with about 2500 tonnes of silver-lead ore extracted from the mines through the 1840s.

You can see it through the trees from the high-rise that snake up towards Mt Osmond - the old smelter chimney is straight up from the tollgate. It served the mines very briefly, built in 1849 and then closed by the Victorian goldrush that evacuated these diggings a couple of years later. Nevertheless, it is celebrated as Australia's oldest smelter chimney. The bluestone-constructed flue dug into the steep hill is still visible, running up from the long gone smelter in the gully. For a very long time, the round stone chimney was whitewashed to serve as a beacon for fishing boats in the gulf.

Glen Osmond itself is named after South Australia's first Colonial Treasurer, the very colourful and rich Osmond Gilles. He took up land here - and scored a silver-lead mine or two soon after. Even before the hidden and character-laden pioneer cemetery here accepted its first souls, the Glen Osmond Mine began just up the rise in the foothills. Perhaps there are Cornish miners at rest in the graveyard, because (after an earlier start) a fortune was raised in London in 1846 for the Glen Osmond Union Mining Company, which brought out ten Cornishmen and their families to work the venture.

Glen Osmond Villa is hidden, too, by modern houses. It was renamed Woodley House when it was taken over by Gilles' brother and it was later surrounded by vineyards. Successive owners developed the famous Woodley's Queen Adelaide wine label, and just one sign of that era is still visible. A huge wine cellar was dug into the hillside to connect with a tunnel of the Glen Osmond Mine. The above-ground stone building has been preserved and converted into a residence with a difference.

Mercifully, one of the Glen Osmond gullies used to be too steep to build on, and so it was designated as a council reserve. It has preserved access to a fascinating link with South Australia's earliest days. As local fitness enthusiasts regularly do, we wound our way above the Sunnyside Road to an old quarry road off which spurred the Jubilee 150 walking tracks that brought us to two entrances of Wheal Watkins. From the higher adit entrance, a panoramic view of the Adelaide plains is prefaced across the gully by the remnant flat mine-head of a colony-saving mine that was begun in 1841.

The infant capital of Adelaide - and its Governor Gawler - were nigh on bankrupt when two Cornish miners found a surface strip of galena running down the ridge. The Governor came out to inspect it and gratefully agreed to have his name on it. Thus, Australia's first mineral ore export came from Wheal Gawler, with 31 cases of ore heading from Pt Adelaide aboard the Cygnet. That mine survived for a decade, worked in its latter years by German miners from the Hartz Mountains.

Back on the signposted-track side of the gully, we peered into the upper adit of Wheal Watkins. (Wheal is Cornish for horizontal tunnel and Mt Watkins was the owner - who stayed in Sussex). His agent Mr Peachey and perhaps twenty or thirty miners hacked away at a lode of silver-lead ore that ran east-west towards the gulf a few kilometres away. It was about a metre wide for much of its deep intrusion in the bluestone hillside, with the highest piece just protruding on the surface of the ridge. The explanatory signage shows that from the top of the shaft - now concealed beneath a local turning circle - the mine plunged down the equivalent of the Santos tower, or thirty stories. In just over seven years the miners took out 1000 tonnes of ore, and some of it was broken down on the mullock-created flat high up the gully. Pickie-boys as young as ten cracked the rocks with hammers and selected the smeltable pieces for transport.

Down the 1986-constructed steep track, there are solid safety timbers added to preserve the lower entrance to Wheal Watkins. It is the way in for regular guided tours into 1840s mining history. Australia's first mines are hidden in the foothills here. This adit runs into the 20 fathom level - translated, that means we're heading along a narrow, not quite-head-high tunnel with irregular sides ... moving along at a right angle to the "drive" itself - the horizontal tunnel that follows the line of the ore - until we meet it about eleven stories down from the top of the mine shaft. Our guide John Clark has left markers that point to "gadholes" - gunpowder-stick sized cylindrical holes laboriously cut into the bluestone with a gad - a chisel hit with sledgehammers. A half dozen holes would be drilled and filled - bang! - and they'd start again.

Deep in the hillside, our torches finally reveal the drive itself, and in the roof of the irregular tunnel we find a thin strip of clay-white rubble that is all that is left of the vertical gap in the blocks of bluestone that hold the sought-after ore.

In a torch-light beam, John showed us samples of the galena they would have picked out here, and pointed to one remnant sliver in a crevice - the crystals flashing in the rarely seen light. Lead is still used in batteries, but in the 1840s when the Cornishmen were carving their way here they were doing it for lead in baths and pipes, roofs, leadlight windows, soldering and more. It was obviously hard-won, because beyond a rockfall the hand-hewn drive runs a good 100 metres towards the sea. A "winze" heads upwards past 150 year old timbers, where miners chased the lode up perhaps 8 stories or so to another level of the mine.

The Burnside Historical Society's guides will happily give you a look at all this, as they run monthly tours. Burnside City Council takes the bookings. It is a terrific time-travelling experience in our underground heritage at the Glen Osmond Mines.

Details
Glen Osmond Mine Tours

Burnside Historical Society
When: 3rd Sunday of each month @ 1:45 pm or groups by appointment.
Where: Tours start at Burnside Council Chambers

Bookings: Community Service Burnside Council - Ph (08) 83664224

Charges: $7 adult $4 school student