Morphett Engine House: Lisa visits Burra in the Mid North region of South Australia

Step into the Burra Visitor Information Centre in the town's main street and the sightseeing options read like a menu board. There's a feast of South Australian heritage on offer in this historic copper mining town.

But on a recent Postcards visit I headed to the very heart beat of the famous Burra mine, the Morphett Engine House. Leigh Fisher showed me around.

"The building originally house a large steam engine that de-watered the mine," explained Leigh. "It was a very wet mine and the water level was very high so the pump system had to de-water the mine so the men could go down into the underground shafts."

From the top of the Morphett Engine House you look down on the modern open cut mine which operated here in the 1970s when the last parcels of lower grade ore were extracted. But more than a century earlier, this site was teeming with a thousand men and boys working underground.

"There are still a few Cornish pumping engines working today," said Leigh. "These giant machines were designed and built in the nineteen century by Cornish engineers."

The video and museum displays inside the Morphett Engine House take you across the globe to the shores of Cornwall, the home of so many of the original Burra miners. The archival footage shows you how they exploited the great beam engines to keep underground mines dry in an environment where water was a problem.

At the Botallack Mine off the coast of England, men worked in shafts extending two point kilometres out to sea and dug at depths of more than four hundred metres. It's said these men could hear the roll and swell of the sea as they worked just below the ocean floor.

From the mid 1840s until 1877 the Cornish men used their engineering and mining skills at Burra. During that time the Monster Mine produced the equivalent of two hundred million dollars worth of copper. Not that the Cousin Jacks, as they were called got to see too much of that.

"They worked under very bad conditions," said Leigh. "It was very wet and they worked by candle light with candles that they had to buy themselves. There were no lifts in the mine so they had to climb their own ladders to get where they were working and that was all done in their own time."

They were hard times for hard men who have certainly left their mark on Burra.

"These buildings were the same all over the world. The Cornish had them built in mines all over the world - Russia, America, everywhere." Said Leigh. "This is the only reconstructed one that we know of in the world. That makes it very special."

And so is the entire Burra Mine site complete with its low and narrow shaft. It's a real hit with the kids and offers them a real insight into life as a Cornish miner in the mid nineteenth century. The Morphett Engine House is three kilometres out of town. You can obtain a key from the Visitor Centre.

Morphett Engine House
3 kilometres from Burra
Passport Trail Key available at Burra Visitor Information Centre, Market Place, Burra