Burra, South Australia
Burra is a pastoral centre and historic tourist town in the mid-north of South Australia. It lies east of the Clare Valley in the Bald Hills range, part of the northern Mount Lofty Ranges, and on Burra Creek.
The town began as a single company mining township that, by 1851, was a set of townships collectively known as "The Burra". The Burra mines supplied 89% of South Australia's and 5% of the world's copper for 15 years, and the settlement has been credited with saving the economy of the struggling new colony of South Australia. The Burra Burra Copper Mine was established in 1848 mining the copper deposit discovered in 1845. Miners and townspeople migrated to Burra primarily from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Germany. The mine first closed in 1877, briefly opened again early in the 20th century and for a last time from 1970 to 1981. The historic townships of Kooringa, Llwchwr, Aberdeen, New Aberdeen, and Graham were included as part of Burra township proper in July 1940.
When the mine was exhausted and closed the population shrank dramatically and the townships, for the next 100 years, supported pastoral and agricultural activities. Today the town continues as a centre for its surrounding farming communities and, being one of the best-preserved towns of the Victorian era in Australia, as a historic tourist centre.
The Burra Charter, which outlines the best practice standard for cultural heritage management in Australia, is named for a conference held here in 1979 by Australia ICOMOS where the document was adopted.
Etymology
The name applied to what is now the town of Burra has changed over time. The Burra Burra Copper Mine was named after the Burra Burra Creek that flows through the town. From at least 1851 the collection of townships near the mine became referred to as "The Burra". The town of Burra was officially formed in 1940 by a notice in the South Australian Government Gazette with the consolidation of the mostly culturally based townships of Redruth, Aberdeen, New Aberdeen, Hampton, Copperhouse, Kooringa, Llwchwr, and Lostwithiel.The name Burra Burra has been asserted to have come from numerous sources. As early as July 1843, when the locality was already a sheep outstation for pastoralist William Peter of Manoora, it was known as Burrow Creek. Despite that obvious connection to the indigenous Ngadjuri people, a later theory persistently postulates that it comes from the Hindustani for 'great great', used by Indians shepherds working for another early pastoralist, James Stein, to refer to creek. The name could also have come from Stein's home country of Scotland or a number of Aboriginal languages. A so-called '' was discovered in 1851 in Devon in the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape; possibly coincidentally several ancient placenames such as Burrator in Devon and Burraton in Cornwall occur nearby; also possible origins for the name. A Burra Burra mine is located in Tennessee and named after the Australian one.
Geology and geography
Burra is located within the Hundred of Kooringa a few kilometres inside Goyder's Line, near Burra, Baldina and Gum creeks. The lies within the Temperate Grassland of South Australia.The main body of copper ore formed between two geological faults in broken dolomite rocks. The ore body was up to 70 metres wide and mainly consisted of green malachite and blue azurite veins and nodules amongst the host rock. The malachite and azurite were formed from copper sulphide minerals, by a process known as "secondary enrichment". This process took millions of years to convert the low grade copper sulphide ore, which was probably created 300 to 400 millions of years ago during the last period of vulcanism near Burra.
Early history
Original inhabitants
The original inhabitants of the Burra area were the Ngadjuri Aboriginal people whose first Western contact was in 1839. The first European squatter in this region was William Peter, whose head station was Gum Creek near Manoora. Pastoralists grazed much of the Ngadjuri land from the 1840s and, although there was conflict, Ngadjuri people worked as shepherds and wool scourers, particularly once the area was emptied during the gold rushes of the 1850s. Their population was seriously depleted by introduced European diseases and they were reported to be extinct by 1878. Traces remain with rock art and burial sites in the area and some people able to claim Ngadjuri ancestry.Discovery of copper
On 9 June 1845 William Streair bore samples of a rich copper ore into the office of Henry Ayers, secretary of the South Australian Mining Association. Streair, a young shepherd in the employ of local pastoralist James Stein, had walked the 90 miles from Burra as did Thomas Pickett, a shepherd on a neighbouring property who made a further find. News of the copper this heralded was published on 21 June in Adelaide newspapers, and the site was soon named The Monster Mine.Governor George Grey had amended land grant regulations forcing the hundred of Kooringa to be a rectangle, placing the two copper finds at opposite ends. Due to the £20,000 price of the land it was divided in two, with each half sold to a different group and the division decided by lot. The surveyed area was named the Burra Creek Special Survey. It is, divided into two squares, 4 miles to a side. A group of wealthy capitalists purchased the southern half of the division and a group of shopkeepers, merchants and SAMA the northern half.
The Burra Burra Mine was established by the snobs in their northern selection, the Princess Royal Mine by the nobs in their southern. In 1846, just north of the division was sold to the Scottish Australian Investment Company for £5,550 where they established the Bon Accord Mine. Mining began on 29 September 1845 with the first gunpowder charge set off on the monster Burra Burra copper lode and by mid-1846, the Bon Accord Mining Company had also commenced operations.
Pastoral activity
From as early as 1843 shepherding had been common around Burra, with pastoral pioneers such as James Stein and William Peter being granted grazing rights for their flocks on unsurveyed land. Over the life of the Burra Mine, most food was brought in as there was no freehold offered by SAMA on the land and no adjoining hundreds were declared until 1860. Agriculture was delayed by the slow surveying of hundreds, as until these had been done there was no freehold or leasehold land but only grazing rights. As Burra lies almost on Goyder's 1865 line it is rated at the edge of marginal land for farming. After mining the town became a pastoral centre, and South Australia's main sheep trading centre until the mid-20th century.The Baldina Run, a major sheep station of some east of Burra, near Kooringa, was established by Henry Ayers in 1851, leased by J and C. B. Fisher until 1862, then taken over by Alfred Barker, son-in-law of James Chambers.
Mining
Burra Burra or "Monster Mine"
Until 1860 the mine was the largest metals mine in Australia. From 1845 to 1877 the mine produced approximately 50,000 tonnes of copper. The mine was reopened as a modern open cut in 1971, operating for a decade with 24,000 tonnes of copper extracted. The mine's Adelaide operation was run by Henry Ayers, secretary of SAMA, from its opening until the 1890s. Henry Roach was chief Captain, responsible for day-to-day operations, from 1847 until his retirement in 1868. The investors had put up a total of £12,320 of which £10,000 was spent purchasing the land. The first dividend was paid on 24 June 1847 and by 1 December 1847 the mine had returned total dividends of £49,280. Over the mine's 32-year life, less than 100 shareholders received £826,586 in mining dividends. All mining dividends stopped after the mine closed in 1877, with the mine area sold in 1902 and the last property of SAMA in Kooringa sold in 1914. A final dividend was paid on 5 May 1916 and SAMA was wound up and closed.Most of the copper was for sale to India as it was taking over a third of world copper supply in the mid-19th century. Due to the lack of smelting in South Australia, copper ore was initially shipped to Cornwall. The company purchased a Cornish beam engine which was the first in Australia when erected in 1848. Due to the uneconomic state of the mine, in 1868 a decision made to open cut the mine. Mining ceased underground, having reached a depth of 183 metres and open-cut operations starting in 1870 although, over the remaining life of the mine, small underground operations extracted more ore than the expensive open cut.
Over the life of the mine, Henry Ayers jealously preserved shareholder profits by ruthlessly controlling wages and expenses. In October 1846 this caused the first strike, of masons and bricklayers, with the company refusing to pay more than 8 shillings per day. With declining copper prices the company continually sought to reduce wages. In August 1847 the company enticed Thomas Burr to take over as general manager, he having resigned his post as Deputy Surveyor General of South Australia, but by September 1848 the unsatisfied company directors had sacked him. By 1848 the wages reached their lowest level, which precipitated the Burra miners' strike, being the first industrial strike in South Australia and earliest workers' strike of any consequence in Australia. The strike came and went numerous times, with miners not completely returning to work until January 1849.
By April 1848 the mine was employing 567 people and supporting a population of 1,500 in the township of Kooringa. Employment at the mine peaked at 1,208 in 1859 and declined continuously until the mine's closure in 1877. In November 1877 most of the remaining disposable equipment and stores were sold off and mining by SAMA ceased.