No 34 Burra

The traveller looking for romance will find it at the Burra. It is so thick that you stumble over it in the dark, and it takes you all your time to dodge it in the light. I have never been in a town to which I reacted so quickly. I could see History oozing out of the Burra like water bubbling out of a spring. And so could my guide the Mayor (Mr. T. H. Woollacott). We were kindred spirits, and we "did" the Burra so thoroughly that I don't believe there was even an insect in the municipality with which we didn't scrape acquaintance. You see, the moment you enter this unique little bit of South Australia you bump against the story of its lurid past in the shape of isolated chimney stack, abandoned mine buildings, discarded machinery, open cuts, and all the other etceteras of a once busy mining town. And if your imagination couldn't reconstruct those hectic days of the forties, when the mines throbbed with life, when lusty throats roared rollicking choruses in Boniface Wren's single-storied shanty pub, and the roads between the copper city and the sea were as alive with virile teamsters as an anthill in the Never Never— then you have no faculty for conceiving mental pictures, and you never will have.

Whether you mooch round the corporation office, gazing at the historic pictures of past mayors and prominent citizens which adorn the walls, or stare at the 120 feet of towering chimney stack which "Puddin'" Jordan had the nerve to climb in his schoolboy teens in defiance of the laws of gravity, your interest is held fast like a fly is held by a honey pot. You simply cannot miss enjoying the Burra.

What Is The Burra?

Actually there is no such place as the Burra. There are three towns— Kooringa, Redruth, and Aberdeen— which were founded so close together that they have grown into one an other. Today they form one large centre, divided by the historic Burra Creek, whose story I will tell you presently. For the sake of convenience the term Burra is employed to e brace these three towns. The original form is Burra Burra. It is not a native word. It is Hindustani, and is supposed to have been conferred on the creek by the coolies who were employed as shepherds in the days when the country was a sheep run. There are, I know, authorities who still persist in regarding Burra Burra as an aboriginal term. The consensus of opinion is against them, however, and the Indian derivation is generally accepted.

Story Of Captain Allen

The story of the Burra begins in 1843. In that year section 1 of the Burra Creek survey (now the Hundred of Kooringa) was granted to Captain William Allen and Samuel Stocks. This Captain Allen, who later be came the chairman of the South Australian Mining Association, was an interesting personality. He came to South Australia in 1839. Five years prior to that he was captain of a sailing ship in the service of the East India Company. The ship was manned by Lascars. There were about 150 of them, and during a voyage from China to Bombay the majority of them mutinied. They murdered twenty of the crew because they remained faithful to the master, and then set out to deal with the captain and officers. The coolness of Allen, however, intimidated the mutineers. Some he won over to his side, and the others were overpowered, ironed, and handed over to the authorities at Singapore, where they were tried and executed.

When Allen came to Adelaide he turned pastoralist. In conjunction with Captain John Ellis, a retired naval officer, he purchased portion of the Milner estate at Port Gawler. It was this transaction which led to the Advocate-General and Colonial Secretary of the day, George Milner Stephen, being accused of falsifying a figure with a view to placing a fictitious value on the land Stephen then held at Port Gawler. The result was a crop of libel actions which almost shook the young colony to its foundations. I have not the space to give you the details, but you will find them in the "Diary of Mary Thomas" in the Public Library. What we are interested in just now is Allen's connection with the Burra, and the strange battle which ensued be tween the Nobs and the Snobs for the possession of the rich copper mine.

The Nobs And The Snobs

If I am unable to present to you a vivid picture of the hectic days of the forties, when the Burra boomed with the deep-throated roar of a 100-ton gun, don't hurl any bouquets at me.

The intestines — that's a much more polite term than the one I ought to use — of the story are "pinched" from Mr. G. H. Pitt, the Public Archivist. In a misguided moment he showed me a collection of notes he had made on the early days of the old copper city. The rest was Fate— his fate. Some time prior to 1845 rumors began to reach the city of an enormously rich mine in the North. Like the renowned diggings of the celebrated Solomon Rex, these rumors bore the legend, "whereabouts unknown." Nevertheless they were persistent enough and extravagant enough to set Adelaide mad with excitement. The metropolis was not ten years old — and at ten years of age one is apt to indulge in enthusiams over rumors which, at a more sober stage of lift, would leave one calmly smoking his pipe in a deep easy chair, with a cold indifference that not even the discovery of The Granites could warm.

The more the rumors persisted the madder Adelaide got, until I believe you could have sold any old hole in the North for as much money as was in the young colony— which wasn't much. Then the information leaked out that a shepherd named Pickett had found the copper on the Burra Creek. Incidentally it might be remarked that Mr. Pickett was about the only man in South Australia who never got in on the deal. I don't think he got a penny piece out of his find. An expert was sent post haste to the scene, and when his report was received the capital became one vast lunatic asylum. He said the outcrop was 18 feet wide and a mile long.

Then began one of the comedies of South Australian mining history— a struggle between two rival groups, called the Nobs and the Snobs, to get possession of the property. There were only two ways of doing this— either by buying the land at auction, which would be an exceedingly risky venture, since oversea and inter colonial capitalists would probably have come on the scene with longer purses than Adelaide of that day could furnish, or by applying for a Special Survey of 20,000 acres at £1 an acre.

Capitalists Who Were Not Capitalists

Now the trouble was that neither the Nobs nor the Snobs had enough money to take out a special survey. The law of the day was that the £20,000 had to be paid in gold coin no bank notes, mortgages, hire agreements, or any of the modern commercial paraphernalia which makes it easy now to raise the wherewithal for big deals. It was 20,000 golden sovereigns planked down over the Treasury counter — or go without the land. The banks could not help, because their entire combined capital did not exceed £25,000. I should have explained that the Nobs group was composed of the leading capitalists of the colony, and the fact that they couldn't raise £20,000 between them shows you the sort of bloated plutocrats they were.

The Snobs were the members of the South Australian Mining Association, composed chiefly of small retail traders. Probably you have seen two roosters stalking each other around the fowl yard, preparatory to a conflict to decide which was to have the honor of partnering the red-feathered jade peeking about the run, pretending to be utterly indifferent to the blood she was causing to flow.

Well, the Nobs and the Snobs were watching each other like that. Whenever one side made a move the other promptly countered it. Thus, when the Snobs learned that the Nobs were intriguing with the South Australia Company to acquire the needed 20,000 sovereigns, they promptly defeated the move by one and all withdrawing their accounts from the company's bank, and seeing that their deposits were refunded in solid gold coin. Finally it dawned on both sides that they were killing each other's chances, and, as the small boy puts it, "Not gettin' nowhere." So they did some hard thinking, and evolved a scheme on lottery-like lines. They decided to pool their resources, obtain the special survey of 20,000 acres, divide it into two parts, and to draw lots for choice of blocks. The Snobs drew the northern portion of the property. This proved to be the valuable block. The Nobs called the southern half the Princess Royal Mine, and worked it with indifferent success. They eventually sold it for £9,000 as a sheep run.

Burra Creek Sees Life

I don't suppose the Burra will ever again see the "hot" times it experienced in those hilarious days of the middle forties. It was on September 29, 1845, that twelve men began blasting and quarrying in a "hole" which was simply one vast pocket of copper. The ore was just dug out. In the first seven months the profits were £20,000. In the next four months they were £50,000. At its peak the mine employed 1,000 men, and as many more indirectly. The product was sent to Port Adelaide for shipment until the shorter route to Port Wakefield was adopted. The journey between Burra and Adelaide occupied eight to ten days, the "express" lorries of the period being heavy waggons drawn by teams of eight bullocks. You will gain some idea of the magnitude of these activities, and of the busy scene the Main North road presented, when I explain that there were generally 800 teams on the road at the one time. The opening of the railway in 1870 put an end to this pic turesque phase of the operations.

But the chief picture I want to put before you is that of the life of Burra Creek from the middle to about the end of the forties. The miners, generally, were a happy-go-lucky, care-free lot. You see, there wasn't any income tax, arbitration court, Jack Lang, or other modern drag on the wheels of industry. The £ was worth twenty shillings, if not more, and the good workman— and they were mostly good those times — could always get a bottle of beer or two thrown in with his wages as a sort of bonus. In that stimulating age the Burra miners never worried about building houses. They constructed subterranean dwellings of several rooms in the banks of the creek, ran holes to the surface to act as chimneys, and put a cask over the hole to prevent their inebriated comrades from falling into the family stew. When these underground rooms were filled with good furniture, pictures, china-dog ornaments, and other popular knick-knacks so cherished by our early colonists, the diggers had homes as good as any in the country. I think our soldiers of the bloody days of 1914-18 must have borrowed the idea of the dugout from our Burra veterans.

There was one drawback to this blissful state of living. Occasionally the Burra Creek would take it into its head to come down a "banker," in which case the miner was evicted with more promptitude than any bailiff could ever show. And he spent the next fortnight or so retrieving the family heirlooms from over a wider area than the special survey. In the end this happened so often that it be came monotonous. The underground dwellings were abandoned, and hence forth the honest worker led a more or less respectable existence on the surface.

The social centre of the lively little community was the Burra Burra Inn. It was a weatherboard shanty which did a trade that would make the licensed victualler of 1933 gape with astonishment. I was going to say the place was never closed, but as one old record says it was the custom of the proprietor to clear the place at closing time with the assistance of a cricket bat, I suppose I must assume that mine host went to bed sometimes. The proprietor of this house in 1847 was Abraham Wren.

In those days the police did not go round the hotels in pairs looking for gentlemen who offered to lay two to one, bar one. Their function was quite different. It was to keep the ring and act as referee in the twenty or thirty fights which took place each pay day (Saturday) at a popular pugilistic rendezvous behind the hotel. An argument had to be pretty urgent for a week-day scrap. It was an unwritten law that such phrases as "You're a blanky liar" had to be justified or rebutted according to the code of the period, either on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. And there were tough customers in the Burra in the days of its exciting infancy. The hotel bar was crowded with a singing, wrestling, swearing crowd, broken glass, and stifling atmosphere. Since then the Burra has become more respectable— but not more interesting.

They had smelting works at the Burra in 1849. They were owned by the Patent Copper Company. The decline began about 1852, but for several years it was so slow that only the very knowing ones sensed the departing greatness. The first "bump" the mine owners received was when, in 1852, the miners deserted practically en masse for the golden fields of Ballarat and Creswick, leaving the unfortunate colony denuded of its males, and nearly bringing it to the dust. There was no hope of replacing those men. The whole country was attacked by gold fever. The disease spread to all classes — doctors, lawyers, school teachers, policemen, sailors, everybody. Your butcher boy was liable to be bitten by the bug while he was handing you the Sunday joint, and to dash off to the diggings with your mutton under his arm, leaving you reaching after him with outstretched arms.

So the Burra mine closed down, and it stayed closed until 1858, when the arrival of a ship load of Cornish miners enabled operations to be recommenced. By 1866 it was apparent that the glory of the mine was departed. That year the price of copper was only £96. Costs of production were rising. Finally, in September, 1877, "Finis" was written across the workings. But, while it lasted, "it was sure some mine," as our American cousins are supposed to say— but don't.

In the thirty odd years of its existence (1845-77) it produced 234,000 tons of ore, worth £4,500,000. It distributed in dividends some £800,000. Its shares topped the peak at £200 each, and the dividends were 800 per cent, of the capital.

Burra of the Seventies

"Soon the unsightly neighborhood of the Burra was lost to view." What do you think of that uncomplimentary sentence, you citizens of Burra, who pride yourselves today, and not without justification, on your well-laid out town, your fine public buildings, and your picturesque gardens? It was written by an English woman who visited the Burra in the middle seventies (1873 or 1874), when the glory of the copper city was already on the wane. Here is the pen picture she has left on record of the Burra of that period: —

"The day on which we were to reach the Burra was a Saturday, and we were in haste to reach there before the men (miners) stopped work for the half-holiday. ... A creek which has its source in the mine, the water of which would stop operations were it not perpetually pumped out, flows through the town. Formerly hundreds of miners cut little dwellings in the banks, and washed the ore from the soil which the stream brought down; and we saw a few persons still "jigging," as this process is called. But now the chief operations are carried on in a hollow in the hillside, which has previously been worked. In the palmy days of the Burra it was not worth while — or the necessary machinery was wanting — to obtain nearly the whole of the metal from the ore, or ore from the surrounding soil, and what is now going on is the extraction of that which remains in the refuse of early times.

'The three townships of Kooringa, Redruth, and Aberdeen are collectively called 'the Burra.' There is a fourth small township about a mile off, of which the name is Copper House. All the buildings of this straggling town are, with the exception of two or three churches, bald and ugly. The country around is extremely dreary. There are no trees, and scarcely any gardens, and the grass has a woebegone aspect familiar in such localities at home. Yet there was a large patch of healthy looking wheat growing close to the mine, so that, perhaps, only time and trouble are needed to spread the grace of luxuriant vegetation over this un inviting region." A prophecy which sixty-odd years has seen realised!

In Paxton square is a terrace of 33 old-fashioned cottages, which make a charming picture. In the good days of the Burra they were built by the mining company for their superior employes. In the midst of a town of humpies they were mansions. Eventually they were bought by John Lewis, who left then in trust for old people at a nominal rental. Burra's swimming pool is the shaft of an old mine. Naturally it is very deep. Burra has produced some big men. The late Chief Justice Way was one of them. He was born on the Burra Creek. Sir Frederick Holder was an other. He by turn was a school teacher in the town, then town clerk, and later mayor, in the days before he dreamt of becoming Speaker of the National Parliament.

Early Days

In the shade of the verandah of the bowling green clubhouse one morning I talked with old Burra about the days when they were merry romping "kids" wondering what the world might he, and regarding the life about them as an endless joke. Disillusion has come to them with the years— but they have only to close their eyes to recall the Burra that was. Hardy old pioneers they are today, as you may judge for yourself from the photograph in the Supplement. They were: — The mayor (Mr. T. H. Woollacott), town clerk (Mr. E. J. Davey), Messrs. J. A. Riggs, Joe Lee, J. Weston, and Charles Pearce, and Mesdames M. A. L. Feltus and J. A. Riggs. They told of the days when the site of the Burra was open, treeless country; the hills covered by thousands of wandering goats.

"Sometimes the hills were white with them," said one old veteran, and I could see that he was mentally visualising those far-off times. "The miners used to hunt them, and the squatters used to destroy them."

That was nearly eighty years ago. Such miners as were not living in dug-outs along the side of the creek bad humpies of hessian and board on Brewery Hill.

"And very comfortable they were, too," interpolated an old lady. Then, going off at a tangent—

"People were kind in those days. I remember when we arrived, that dear old man, Willam Cullen, met us coming out of church. 'You are strangers,' he said. 'When did you get here?' We told him we had come the day before. 'Then you have not had time to get your meal ready,' he answered. 'You must come home with me to dinner.' That was the spirit of the Burra in the fifties."

Blacks Took Their Dinner

Those days the blacks roamed the country in large numbers. They always knew if there were men about, and left the settlers alone. But if the men were away they would go to the houses and threaten the women. Mrs. Feltus told me of one such incident. It was a Sunday morning, and the family, with the exception of the mother was at church. The mother had stayed home to cook the dinner. The menu that day was stuffed bullock's heart and pudding. Presently a couple of black faces appeared at the window. "Gib um tucker," they demanded, accompanying the order with hostile grimaces.

The woman was terrified. Hastily picking up the cooked heart she handed it to them. They sniffed it, grunted their disapproval, and threw it on the ground. After they had tired of kicking it about they went off. When the family came home there was no dinner for them.

The feminine fashion of those days was the crinoline. When two or three women got into a pew there was little room left for anybody else. The men's distinctive headgear was a huge bell topper. Almost everybody wore one of these chimney pots on Sundays.

Burra of those days boasted only the one hotel. This, presumably was of a later date than the pioneer building I told you about a little while ago, because it was a stone building, with a circus ring in front. It was kept by a man named Cowper. On one festive occasion a whole bullock was roasted in the ring in front of this building. My informants could not tell me what the occasion was. That hotel or its vicinity was the scene of some wild days. Fisticuffs were the commonest form of excitement. Sometimes the crowd of untamed spirits got out of control. Then things were likely to happen. There was one such occasion — a pay day — when a policeman was so badly beaten by the mob that he was never the same man afterwards. He had tried to arrest a rough, but the man's mates interfered and one of the liveliest melees in the history of the town ensued.

Old Mule Teams

The streets of Burra today are of bitumen, and the footpaths kerbed. But they were not always so. In the way back days long strings of mules in charge of Spaniards used to traverse the roads bringing coal from Kapunda, and they could churn up more mud in a day than most people now see in a month. Those teams commonly got bogged in the main street, and the air was turned blue with Spanish profanity. But, as nobody understood, not even the mules, no harm was done. On their journey back to Kapunda the mule teams carried ingots of smelted copper.

Woollacott Jinker

Mention of the mules reminds me of one of the most wonderful feats of carting in the history of the State. This was the conveyance of the huge boiler required for the pumping plant at the Burra mine. The contractor was William Woollacott, grandfather of the present mayor. Old residents still talk about that feat as one of the outstanding events of the big days. To appreciate it properly you have to visualise conditions as they were in the early fifties. There were no metalled roads. The mud tracks climbed up and down the hills which lie between Adelaide and the Burra.

When the huge boiler arrived at Port Adelaide (unfortunately I cannot give the weight) its transport to its destination was a problem which gave the directors of the company some nasty headaches. With it came a jinker. To save myself the trouble of explaining what sort of a vehicle this was I give you on this page a photograph of the actual machine as it appears today, for it still stands, defying wind and rain, on the abandoned property of the old mine. Look at the three separate wheels on the one "pelly," and the tremendous nave. The jinker measured 30 feet over all. The tyres were 16 inches wide. Forty bullocks were employed to haul that piece of iron hugeness over the hundred miles of hilly country be tween Port Adelaide and Kooringa. Every imaginable kind of trouble was encountered on the trip. There were no bridges, and streams had to be forded. Woollacott's progress from day to day was recorded as we would record an aeroplane flight today. The whole town turned out to give the plucky teamster a welcome when it was reported that he was within sight. For delivering his load the driver received £500 and a bonus. I do not think that carrying feat has ever been exceeded in Australia. The jinker depicted here is said to be the only thing of its kind in the country.

NEXT WEEK Riverton: Memories of Masters and Swinden.

Images:

• The Burra mines in the early sixties, showing the extensive nature of the workings. — Courtesy of the Archives.

• Old mine chimney, 120 ft. high, which a schoolboy, 'Puddin'" Jordan, climbed many years ago. —-'Chronicle' photo.

• The old jinker used to cart the huge boiler from Port Adelaide to the mines in the fifties under the circumstances narrated in the article. — "Chronicle" photo.