Jetty Tour Day 9 - Moonta

Its nice to be staying put instead of packing up and moving on.

I started the day with walk just after sunrise. Some nice views, especially out on the jetty, although the deck was a little slippery on the far end of the jetty which was a little daunting in that that section only has safety railing on the one side!

We started our exploration of Moonta with a coffee - naturally - and then a visit to the tourist information office. Sue sent us off on a tour of the old mine site, to the east of the town.

Before Moonta existed, is was a pretty poor farming or grazing area, with several landlords of large holdings finding it hard to make a living. Sir William Hughes was one of them. After noticing that the roots of trees he had on his fire burnt in green flame, he instructed his shepherds to be on the look out for green rocks, with copper being his idea. One shepherd, Patrick Ryan, observed green coloured rocks throwing backwards from a wombat digging. After reporting it to Hughes, he also told another landholder and when that became apparent to Hughes he sent a rider, with eight horses, to get to Adelaide to register the fine.

Copper mining began in 1861 and continued for more than sixty years and was so successful, that in the 1870's, income from the copper mine saved the South Australian government for going bankrupt.

To fuel all this, the government offered free transport to Australia from Cornwall for men with specific skills and come they did, in their droves. Their success in the Moonta area and across the Yorke Peninsular is seen in the architecture of building which have lasted, in some case, for 150 years.

Moonta beach

A small but Australia-wide example of the influence of the Cornish comes in the simple Cornish Pastie. The pastie was designed with the pinches on the pastry along the edges specifically for the miners in the Moonta copper mine. As part of the processing of the copper, arsenic was a by-product. The miners could sometimes have this on their fingers when they ate, so they would hold the pastie by the crimps and eat the rest, throwing the crimps away.

The pasties themselves would sometimes be a complete meal. In one end, meat and vegies and in the other, a sweet mixture for dessert!

We saw some wonderful buildings, from the simple miner's cottage and its lovely cottage garden; to the skeleton's of the mine itself; through to a huge church and the amazing school built for the miner's children, because all of those Cornish miners arrived in South Australia with wives and families. At its maximum enrollment, 1100 children were enrolled and all catered for in the one large, remarkable building. It's now a really excellent museum with one of the highlights being the cartoons of Oswald Pryor.

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A bit of shopping in the afternoon and yet another amazing sunset.

An another day in the area before we move on.