Riders of the purple...

Just outside the grape region of the Barossa is Kapunda, the first mining town in Australia. We haven’t exhausted our first in Australias yet and we are a short distance into our trip. Copper was discovered in 1840 here by local squatter, Mr Dutton on his ride back from somewhere. Now what has this to do with trees. Well you might ask, but it has a few trees around, and it is on the way to another copper mine, larger, which has a lot of trees. Trees were cut to feed the steam pump, line the stopes, and roof the miners’ houses. That’s my excuse. The chimney was built by the Cornish miners who worked the mine. The purple flower is Salvation Jane, or Patterson’s curse, depending where you are. It is now illegal for a local Council to remove these weeds from the roadside because they provide nectar of bees. Mr Dutton went on to own a station, now historical, called Anlaby, and one of his descendants was the writer poet, Geoffrey Dutton.

This hole was dug by hand. 14000 tons of ore was got from here, average grade 22%, a deposit which would cause paroxysms of joy in any mining company’s boardroom today. At first it was bagged and sent to Wales for smelting, but eventually it was smelted on site, using even more trees.
Here is a statue of the bugger that did the job. Must’ve taken a week given the size of him. I think there were several hundred employed as miners, others in ancillary trades. Mostly Cornish. Mining history in SA is Cornish during colonial times.