Inneston: Yorke Peninsula

It looks idyllic now with the old Inneston Lake providing the perfect backdrop for a town which has seen better days. But this was once a bustling centre with its own bakehouse, store, butcher shop, community hall and classroom. Initially known as Cape Spencer, the town was supported by a thriving gypsum industry, with workers battling the searing summer heat to extract slabs from the lake floor. "It started out as just a mining town on a salt lake just behind Stenhouse Bay but as community pride grew the residents asked to be named Inneston and so they were in 1927. The gypsum was used to make plasterboard and much of it still adorns many homes in Adelaide to this day. Other by-products were also extracted including chalk. In fact Bell Co. supplied chalk - made at Inneston - to schools throughout the country. But one of the most backbreaking tasks here was digging for salt. "It's good to see some of the Inneston buildings being saved, this is the site of the old Inneston Post Office. That meant it was a common site for the salties and the gypos." As they recline on the verandah at their home in Stansbury, this 92 year old Saltie Frank Evans and his wife Madge remember well the hard times at Inneston. "You couldn't get a job, not only me there were thousands looking for jobs."

It was at the end of the Great Depression that Frank finally secured full-time work in the town and with the outbreak of War, Inneston was given a real boost. "Some brainy joker found out that in salt, the solution when they melt the salt, there was certain chemicals they wanted for the ammunition. So that really boosted the salt trade then. Up to a point it was pretty crude but you don't mind when there's no work about and you've got a job that looks like it might be fairly permanent. It was really a mining camp then that's all it was." The singlemen's huts were located on the other side of the lake well away from the married quarters. And while it was a case of twelve hour days, Frank remembers the compensations of working in a remote frontier town. "There was all the holes in these reefs and you take a spud out in a jig, drop it down the hole and wait a little while and bang you got shaking around a dirty big Cray, no trouble at all you know. But most of the time it was just hard work, loading gypsum or salt bound for Stenhouse Bay.

Here at the stables the sign tells you that you can head off for six kilometres down here down the original railway track all the way to Stenhouse Bay. Imagine those old stringybark wooden rails. And as you walk down through the scrub you might contemplate that it probably wouldn't be here today in a park if it weren't for the mining town of Inneston. Dean Cordes the National Parks guru points out that the mining leases stopped the scrub bashing and the barley farming from coming in." More info ph 08 8854 4040 fax 08 8854 4072 or email info@postcards.sa.com.au

Join Keith when he explored the The Spectacular Toe at Innes National Park on The Yorke Peninsula.