Moonta Mine

Wheal is the Cornish word for mine and that's entirely appropriate for this enormous pit just outside Moonta which circles its way like a corkscrew to the lode below. This is the Wheal Hughes mine, named after Walter Watson Hughes mine owner and benefactor of South Australia. And the journey down here tells you a lot about an ore find which played a crucial role in the economic life of the State. "That's what they call a floor lode, the other lode is there where the fan is." "So they run down that way?" "Yer all the copper you find here runs at an eighty degree angle." And it runs deep in fact to 95 metres below sealevel, but you won't get that far unless you're travelling by submarine. "We're going to 55 and you can see the water at seventy." "And that seawater, is it seawater that's come in from an aquifer from the ocean?" "Yep." "So the water down there must be incredibly salty?" "Seven times saltier than the sea."

Wheal Hughes was a working mine up until six years ago and had been operated by Western Mining since 1966. It was just one of many copper ore lodes found in the Moonta area. The first dates back to 1861 when a shepherd found copper in a wombat's burrow. By the 1870s the Moonta mining Company was one of the biggest mining operations in the world and the first mining company in Australia to pay one million pounds in dividends to its shareholders. In fact the copper from this region helped stave off financial ruin in the early days of what was then a struggling colony. "But nowadays there's not the same call for copper as there used to be." "No." "Why's that?" "Hot water systems have mainly gone to glass, they've got no copper. Telephone lines are now optic fibre, cars are gone, microchips, there's no coins and it just goes on and on." "So where to now?" "We'll go to fifty five." Fifty five metres below sealevel and the combination of salt water and copper has produced these clumps of copper sulphate. "It's pretty fragile when it comes off. Its not a gristle, it's a real salt gel." "God you're right." Getting the ore out has always been hard work. These drills were supported by hydraulically operated stands which miners took into the most amazing places. "And people would be working up there?" "Yes they'd work up there." "Right up there?" "Yer, you'd take you're drill with you , blast , the rocks would fall down and you'd go up again." "How did you get up there?" "Climb the rocks." "With a drill?" "Yer". "It's certainly not hard work for visitors to wind their way through this tourist mine. Alwyn Johns takes tours daily. Admission for Adults is $12 dollars and $6 for children.

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