Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta

Description

Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta is located on the traditional lands of the Ngadjuri and Narungga peoples, respectively, who occupied these lands for thousands of years prior to European settlement and dispossession from the nineteenth century. Burra and Moonta figure in their oral traditions and in European contemporary written records and illustrations, while their culture is tangibly expressed in the wider landscape. 

Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta is a serial cultural landscape nomination of two component parts located in the Mid-North region of the state of South Australia, Australia. Both are historic ‘Cornish’ copper mining landscapes in comparatively remote country, separated by around 130 km: Burra State Heritage Area in the Mount Lofty Ranges (in the east), and Moonta Mines State Heritage Area on the plains of the Yorke Peninsula (in the west), a little over 3 km from the Spencer Gulf. Burra is located around 160 km NNE of the State capital Adelaide, and Moonta around 160 km NNW of Adelaide.

The nominated property contains the most authentic and historically significant components of the Cornish mining landscape in Australia for the period 1845 to 1923 (Burra 1845-77 and Moonta 1861-1923).

Burra State Heritage Area is located in the Burra Hills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, traditional lands of the Ngadjuri people. Their culture is expressed through dance, songs, paintings, and sand drawings, as well as engravings and etchings in stone which are visible in the surrounding landscape. According to creation stories, the bronze winged pigeon flew from the north into Burra, leaving behind his droppings, which over time became copper ore. Stories like this provide guidance to the Ngadjuri people about how to navigate and survive on the land, about Ngadjuri spiritual life, and about how to live according to Ngadjuri lore.

The Burra component part comprises Burra Burra Mine and Burra Smelts Historic Sites, both internationally significant in their own right, together with Australia’s earliest, largest, and best-preserved cluster of nineteenth century mining townships, including Australia’s first company town. The mine site and townships present the earliest, and fullest, examples of Cornish mining and domestic architecture in Australia and, outside Cornwall and West Devon, worldwide.

Burra may be simply divided into three principal zones: a central mining-smelting area, and two urban precincts – one south of the mine (Kooringa, Australia’s first planned company town) and one north (a collection of Government-surveyed and private townships).

The zone of primary mining, ore-processing, and smelting is centred on Burra Burra Mine with its three Cornish engine houses, massive opencut, and, among many other landscape features and structures, a powder magazine and mine store that are among the oldest mine buildings in Australia (both 1847). The Burra Smelts Historic Site is an extensive archaeological site of a pioneering copper smelter, at the time the largest outside of Swansea in Wales. It began production in 1849 with a full complement of skilled immigrant Welsh staff. The site is complemented by a former office and manager’s residence, smelter stables and yard, and adjacent ‘Welsh’ village of Llwchwr.

The company township of ‘Kooringa’ is in the south, adjacent to the former ore deposit of Burra Burra Mine. Laid out in 1846, this was the first settlement in Burra, the first surveyed mining township in Australia, and ranks as one of the world’s early and outstanding examples of planned industrial settlements and company towns. Wholly owned by the company for the most productive part of the mine’s life, its layout is a planned grid of 40 acres in half-acre blocks inside the mining lease and spanning Burra Burra Creek running from south to north. Proximity to the mine, and topography, dictated the most suitable area for Kooringa, its spatial-functional plan remaining well-preserved. The consistently applied urban grid of streets, blocks, and plots is aligned with, and integrated into, the rectilinear arrangement of natural topography, a design that imparts a satisfying and picturesque quality to the town. The town retains, to a remarkable extent, its original 1846 planned grid and many nineteenth century buildings and structures which serve as testimony to when the mine was one of the world’s greatest copper producers - especially in the period from 1845 to 1851 and from 1856 to 1867.

Government and private industrial townships built from 1849 onwards lie immediately adjacent to, but outside of, the mine lease area in the north. The oldest two townships mark, precisely, the northern boundary of the mine survey and lease and include the Government-surveyed Redruth township which lay closest to the mine entrance.

Moonta Mines State Heritage Area is located on the relatively level plains of the Yorke Peninsula (Guuranda), traditional lands of the Narungga people (Nharangga Dhura) who occupied this area and beyond. Narungga have lived in harmony with this land since Creation and believe that the actions of Ancestral Beings created the features and characteristics of the landscape we see today. The exploits of these Beings and the laws which originated from their actions are reiterated through Creation Stories. Celebrations, known as Gurri, relive these stories through song, drama, dance and poetry and reinforce people’s ancient connection to their land. It is often spoken that the green firelight of a Narungga campfire, typical of a Gurri, first alerted Hughes (owner of the pastoral lease and subsequently of Moonta mines) to the presence of copper.

The Moonta component part comprises the principal mining landscape of Moonta Mines. This is a patchwork of primary mining landscapes and typical ad-hoc Cornish miners’ cottages. Distinctive to the Cornish technology of deep shaft mining are a number of shafts along ‘lines of the lode’, notably Hughes Shaft with pumping engine house (1865) connected by a former line of flat-rods to pumps in Taylors Shaft with a surviving in situ technical fragment. Outstanding cobbled copper ore floors, the most extensive and best-surviving anywhere, are complemented by ore processing areas, notably Richman’s with engine house (1869) which powered crushers, Cornish rolls, and mechanical jigs, together with large dumps of sand tailings and flats of slimes and a copper precipitation works (1901) in Devonshire style. Tramways, railways and numerous roads and tracks criss-cross the site, with scattered miners’ cottages, typical of the hundreds that were constructed by miners on the Moonta Mines lease area. Other exemplary elements are the Moonta Mines Methodist Church (1865) and former Moonta Mines School (1877) and the Assayer’s residence and ruins of mine offices and mine manager’s residence.

Justification of Outstanding Universal Value

Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta is located on the traditional lands of the Ngadjuri and Narungga peoples, respectively, who occupied these lands for thousands of years prior to European settlement and dispossession from the nineteenth century.

The nominated property comprises two separate component parts located in the mid-north of the state of South Australia. Commencing in the 1840s, the property marks the first major transfer of Cornish mining technology, and Welsh smelting technology, to the other side of the globe and illustrates the formative changes that the Cornish system made to deep mining practices around the world. Moreover, it represents the world’s foremost example of transferred Cornish mining technology, skills and culture, demonstrated to the highest degree in a surviving coherent cultural landscape.

These internationally significant Cornish copper mining landscapes are situated in comparatively remote country separated by around 130 km: Burra State Heritage Area in the hilly Mount Lofty Ranges in the east, and Moonta Mines State Heritage Area on the plains of the Yorke Peninsula in the west. They are directly associated with the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site (UK) that represents the origin and flourish of the Cornish metalliferous mining tradition which made a profound contribution to the technology and frontiers of international metal mining throughout much of the nineteenth century – including the British Province of South Australia where Burra and Moonta were, successively and at times, the largest copper mines in the world supplying around ten per cent of global production of this crucially important industrial metal. 

Metal mining, most notably for copper, transformed the landscape, economy, and society of the sites in Cornwall and West Devon, and in South Australia. Together, they exemplify the evolution, development, and diffusion of Cornish mining technology, especially the creative application of steam power as arguably the greatest of its technical innovations.

Burra and Moonta represent the fullest expression of the global transfer of the Cornish Mining tradition, especially the transplant of high-pressure steam technology and the systematic migration of miners and their families from Cornwall and West Devon, particularly between 1844 and 1886. A legacy of iconic Cornish engine houses and an unparalleled range of settlement types, from creek-bank dugouts to Australia’s first company town, is testimony to a pattern of mass migration linked directly to the relative fortunes of mining in Southwest England and South Australia. This had a profound effect on mining progress and settlement at the site, and elsewhere in Australia, New Zealand, and in the wider expansion of the international mining frontier, including the Americas and South Africa.

Criterion (ii): Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta represents unparalleled and comprehensive testimony to landscape transformation related to the transfer and interchange of the revolutionary Cornish system of hard-rock mining and traditional mining culture. This first transfer from Cornwall and West Devon to the other side of the world, to the British Province of South Australia in the 1840s, was accompanied by the pronounced migration of miners and their families most notably from 1844 to 1886. Such contracted immigration also included Welsh smelter-men from 1848.

The cultural landscape is readily distinguished by the mines and their engine houses as icons of Cornish mining technology and industrial architecture, a comprehensive range of ore-processing and smelting sites, tramways, railways and roads, and the distinctive settlements that sprang up to house the workforce. This landscape content is overtly Cornish in character, from shafts and ore floors to miners’ cottages and chapels, and is testimony to the success of the interchange. While Burra was the pioneer Cornish-Australian copper mine which first entered the world stage, it was at the successive Moonta where the Cornish mining system was refined in aspects of mining and ore-processing through continual innovation in machine technology and in areas of labour organisation and labour relations.

Burra and Moonta, through its successful system of technological and cultural transfer, had a profound effect on mining progress and settlement in South Australia and elsewhere in Australia (e.g., Bendigo and Ballarat in Victoria, and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia), in New Zealand (e.g., Coromandel Peninsula, North Island), and in the wider expansion of the international mining frontier, including the Americas (e.g., Keweenaw in Michigan, and Grass Valley in California) and South Africa (Okiep copper mines, Kimberley, and the Rand).

Criterion (iii): Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta is a unique and exceptional testimony to traditional Cornish mining culture and its transcontinental spread from Southwest England during the nineteenth century. It represents the fullest expression of surviving tangible and intangible attributes with the greatest coherence, worldwide. 

While the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape (UK) presents legible testimony to the success of the Cornish system of industrialised mining as originally developed, it does not readily illustrate the outstanding phenomenon of international migration and cultural transfer, as noted in the Site’s inscription. The Australian sites achieve this in an unparalleled manner, by successfully transplanting into remote territories its full technological expression illustrated by its engine houses, shafts and open-cuts, waste-tips, waterwheel pits, copper ore-crushers, buddles and ore-floors, tramways, smelter sites and diverse settlements including miners’ creek-bank dugouts, unplanned housing on the mine lease, Australia’s first company town, and government surveyed townships.

Intangible attributes of industrial organisation are legible in the numerous ore-floors where copper was valued under the Cornish tribute system, and later labour politics. Cornish cultural traditions are manifest in Methodist chapels and Anglican churches (religion), band halls and bandstands (music), and squares that once hosted traditional wrestling matches and hand rock-drilling contests. Cornish language, names and placenames, and literature, remains in memory, while foods such as pasties and saffron cake that are baked daily and Kernewek Lowender the biennial Copper Coast Cornish Festival (Moonta) attest to living traditions in ‘Australia’s Little Cornwall’.

Mining, however, led to substantial direct and indirect impacts on the traditional lands of the Ngadjuri people around Burra and the Narungga people on the Yorke Peninsula. Their ancestral movement patterns and way of life were irrevocably changed. Further dispossession of land, together with the radical alteration of vegetation and waterways which also lessened the supply of wild animals that they had hitherto depended on for subsistence, curtailed traditional ways of seasonal travel through Country. Forced adaptation to a new and broadly more static way of life - on sheep stations, wheat farms and missions, and in and around the mining centres themselves, served to preserve some semblance of community. Today, there are continuing connections to the region, and distinct beliefs, cultural practices, and languages are actively sustained.  

Criterion (iv): Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta represents the world’s foremost example of the transference of Cornish mining technology, skills and culture, demonstrated to the highest degree in a surviving coherent cultural landscape. The site as a technological ensemble landscape reflects the formative changes that the Cornish system made to mining practices around the world and the substantial contribution that South Australia made to global copper production, becoming the world’s third largest producer by 1850.

Burra (1845-77) and Moonta (1861-1923) mining landscapes were created during the maturity of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Europe and occurred at a crucial formative period in the development of modern industry, society and the growth of a global capitalist economy. Metal mining, most notably for copper, transformed the landscape, economy, and society of the sites in Cornwall and West Devon, and in South Australia. Together, they exemplify the evolution, development, and diffusion of Cornish mining technology, especially the creative application of steam power as arguably the greatest of the technical innovations developed during this significant stage in human history.

The export of South Australian copper continued to supply Britain, Europe, and Asia with a crucial industrial metal. Ironically, this contributed to a pronounced geographical shift in copper production away from Europe, and to the ultimate demise of the Cornish and West Devon copper mining industry by 1870.

Statements of authenticity and/or integrity

Authenticity

Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta fulfils the conditions of authenticity, asserting its values truthfully and credibly as expressed through a range of attributes that closely parallel those identified in the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site. The Burra and Moonta sites are extremely well documented in a variety of sources including: paintings, photographs, plans, company reports and mining journals, family records, objects associated with mining, and in modern archaeological survey, artefacts and literature.

The nominated property has high authenticity in terms of form and design (responding to transplanted Cornish technology and socio-cultural traits) and (local) materials, and in the location and setting of surviving features. The organisational expression of the Cornish mining system is highly legible in terms of the technological functional-spatial arrangement of working systems, while Methodist chapels illustrate the non-conformist religious heritage that was predominant among the Cornish managerial classes and miners.

Burra, with the largest townships, retains the better constructed and more architecturally significant property which illustrates living historic centres. Where restoration and reconstruction has occurred, notably Burra Burra Mine’s Morphett’s pumping engine house’s use as a museum (1986), a high level of respect for authenticity has been paramount. Cornish language is evident in mining terms, first adopted in Australasia in South Australia, in place names, street names, surnames, and colloquial expression, while food culture remains strong and is highlighted by the Cornish pasty and saffron cake, all contributing unquestionably to spirit and feeling and sense of place.

Integrity

Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta includes relict mining landscapes with remnant mining and smelting infrastructure and objects associated with mining activities. Following mine closures in 1877 and 1923 respectively, the mines were decommissioned, and equipment and infrastructure was removed. The engine houses, associated buildings, and other features, including ore-processing and smelting sites, demonstrate a high functional integrity and are in various states of intactness, a number having been conserved or surviving in good condition as stable archaeological remains. Much of the settlement and social infrastructure remains in living community use and is mostly in good condition.

Structural integrity is also high in both technological ensembles and settlement patterns over time. The sites provide an outstanding reflection of the prosperity derived from ‘Cornish’ mining operations and how this transformed the landscape, including the introduction of new settlements, and encapsulating the extent of those changes.

The nominated boundaries of Burra and Moonta coincide precisely with entries in the Australian National Heritage List (2017) and the South Australian Heritage Register (1993 and 1984, respectively). They are of adequate size to ensure the complete representation of the attributes and processes which convey the property’s significance. The property does not suffer from adverse effects of development and/or neglect and is not under threat. There is no possibility of resumption of mining due to statutory heritage protection.

Comparison with other similar properties

A comprehensive comparative analysis, including site visits to the sites most closely comparable to Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta, demonstrates that the Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta ranks unequivocally as the preeminent site to demonstrate the successful and most complete global transplantation of Cornish Mining technology, skills and culture. Outside of Cornwall and West Devon, the site is unparalleled in its exceptional combination of attributes.

Other than the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape (UK), there are no closely comparable properties on the World Heritage List, and none on Tentative Lists.

International sites:

Of the many mining sites that represent the global transference of Cornish mining, the following most closely compare to the Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta -  Okiep and the Namaqualand copper mining landscape (South Africa), Pachuca-Real del Monte silver mining district (Mexico), Linares-La Carolina lead mining district (Spain), Allihies copper mining landscape (Ireland), and Kapunda and Wallaroo-Kadina copper mining districts (South Australia). While no North or South American sites were deemed closely comparable, several were included in the comparative analysis, for example the Keweenaw Peninsula copper mines (Michigan, USA), Butte (Montana, USA), Grass Valley (California, USA) and  Morro Velho (Brazil). 

Okiep and the Namaqualand Copper Mining Landscape (South Africa) is partly comparable and complementary to the nominated site. However, while it illustrates a direct transplantation of the Cornish mining technological system, albeit at a smaller scale, it does not provide as a strong indicator of wider Cornish cultural traditions. It does illustrate the importance of Cornish-style engineering and hard-rock deep-shaft mining, especially steam pumping, and possesses a similar geographical reach to that of the nominated site. It also possesses an extant beam engine, but lacks further engine houses (there were only ever two, and the second survives only in archaeological foundations on the edge of the Okiep ‘glory hole’). The smelter retains substantial archaeological potential, given the global rarity of surviving nineteenth century smelting technology. While the mine’s company housing survives in a reasonable state of conservation it is much smaller than that of the nominated site, and there is a well-preserved Methodist chapel. The main settlements are much reduced in terms of authenticity and integrity, with most housing connected to the mines no longer extant. While Cornish culture was once notable, albeit concentrated in small pockets, there remains little evidence of this today. Transport routes, especially the Port Nolloth railway and port, survive with high integrity, and to a lesser extent the earlier bullock cart route to Hondeklip Bay.

Pachuca-Real del Monte Silver Mines (Mexico) is partly comparable and complementary to the nominated property. It illustrates the importance of Cornish-style engineering and hard-rock deep-shaft mining, especially steam pumping with four surviving Cornish engine houses. It also demonstrates a similar geographical reach to that of the nominated site. While several important buildings and an outstanding cemetery survive, it does not illustrate the transplanting of Cornish cultural tradition, notably settlements, like the nominated site and as established by the Cornish and West Devon Mining Landscape. It was London capital which financed the reopening of the mines, managed by John Taylor & Sons, who were also behind the Okiep mines in South Africa, Linares-La Carolina in Spain, and Kolar Gold Fields in India.

Linares-La Carolina Mining Landscape (Spain) is partly comparable and complementary to the nominated site. It illustrates the importance of Cornish-style engineering and hard-rock deep-shaft mining especially steam pumping and has 35 Cornish engine houses, comprising the largest concentration outside of Cornwall and which are sensational within the landscape. It was also financed with the help of John Taylor & Sons. However, apart from the engine houses and shafts, the site does not illustrate the typical Cornish mining landscape technologically (it was for lead and technologies were imported from elsewhere), and socially as it lacks typical settlements and social infrastructure associated with Cornish mining landscapes. 

Allihies ‘Cornish’ copper mining landscape (Ireland) is partly comparable and complementary to the nominated site, illustrating Cornish-style engineering and hard-rock deep-shaft mining, especially the man-engine and steam pumping, winding, and crushing engine houses. However, in global comparative terms copper production was very small and it does not demonstrate strong Cornish cultural traditions. Cornish engine houses also survive at Knockmahon Mine (Tankardstown) in Waterford, Avoca mines in Wicklow, and elsewhere in Ireland, without transplanting other technological and social aspects considered essential to an outstanding representation of a Cornish mining landscape. 

National sites:

Kapunda and Wallaroo-Kadina copper mining districts (South Australia) contain Cornish mining landscapes of a lesser degree of authenticity and integrity than that of the nominated site. Nonetheless they support the wider presentation and tourism offer of Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta. Both were analysed as a part of the comparative analysis prepared for the inclusion of Burra and Moonta on Australia’s National Heritage List.

Cornish miners also migrated elsewhere in Australia, including the Victorian Goldfields (Victoria), Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie (Western Australia), Broken Hill (New South Wales), Charters Towers (Queensland), and many more. While each possess varying degrees of tangible evidence of Cornish mining culture, none match the rich combination of specific attributes evident in Australian Cornish Mining Sites: Burra and Moonta and established by the Cornish and West Devon Mining Landscape.