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From Heritage New Zealand, Autumn 2005

Mine Hosts

by Paul Little

Once South Australia's biggest town, Burra is a copper-bottomed success.

“I feel like I’m at Movie World”, said one of my companions. Apart from the total absence of giant talking rabbits, costumed superheroes and theme rides, I could see what he meant. Burra, South Australia, is that rare thing in this part of the world – an almost intact heritage town. It boasts more historic sites per square kilometre than any other town in Australia.

Dugouts that were once home to miners. Photo: South Australia Tourist Commission

The discovery of copper here in 1845 led to the creation of the
town, which grew up around its mine. Most of the mineral was
sucked from the ground over just two decades, but the town
carried on as sheep farming flourished in the area. Today, mine buildings, pits and tunnels survive to be explored, and bright blue cuprous flecks still dot the ground around the site.

You don’t have to exercise your imagination much to be
mentally carried back to the town’s origins – just add noise, dirt and whatever the odour of a working copper mine is and you’re there.The town’s proximity to the mine must have meant no one could be unaware of its presence.

At its most prosperous, Burra had a population of 5000, greater than that of Perth and Brisbane combined.Today, it is home to just over 1000 souls, all of them welcoming and every other one ready to tell the visitor a little of their home’s history.

One of the first things they will tell you is that in 1979, Breaker Morant was filmed here. (Apart from that, there’s not much more to Burra’s post-mine history. It snowed in 1901.) Part of the movie took place in the stern surroundings of Redruth Gaol. Small but perfectly formed, the gaol was home to up to 30 prisoners.Today, wall displays tell their stories and reveal on what slight grounds anyone could end up here, particularly miscreant adolescent females.

Like most of Burra’s attractions, the gaol is “five minutes from
town”. That would be by car, but much that is worth seeing is
within walking distance.

The town would have little use for a functioning jail today.
Cars and homes are routinely left unlocked.There is a policeman but he seems as relaxed as everyone else.The attitude to travellers is also relaxed.The information centre supplies a key that provides admission to all the town’s heritage sites. Visitors can thus take them in at their own speed in their own time.

Burra is incongruously verdant in the parched South Australian
landscape, thanks to the spring that provides its water. (Admittedly, New Zealand-style expanses of lawn are rare.) This contrast between the town and its arid surroundings reinforces its slight aura of unreality.

Today, the town is as sleepy as the flies that glue themselves
to your back if you venture very far from the outskirts. It gets
hot here, temperatures in the high 30s being not uncommon.
The population is dominated by the very young and those over 30. Members of the intervening demographic tend to be at boarding school or have moved to larger centres for work or to further their studies.

Burra boasts one and a half streets of shops, two accountants,
five pubs and half a dozen antique stores.Anything you could ask for in a heritage town is here. Its heart is the band rotunda in the main street, next to the war memorial obelisk surmounted by a statue of an Anzac with bayonet fixed.There is a stream, of course, and a dinky bridge. Every morning, volunteer senior citizens tend the gardens along the stream’s bank before the high heat of the day makes such effort impossible.

The old Post Office is now an art gallery and the Harry Potteresque railway station hasn’t been in use since the 1980s, but nor has it, remarkably, been subject to the attention of vandals or the taggers who would have adorned it in a larger centre. The old Burra Town Hall is still the Burra Town Hall.

The mine site is Burra’s must-see attraction, with its restored Engine House, spooky tunnels and large water hole, its contents rendered a vivid blue by the presence of copper.
No one knows how deep the hole is but scuba divers train in it.

And, if it’s modern heritage you seek, the Burra Hotel has a bar that’s straight out of Australian mythology, its walls adorned with advertising posters and souvenirs that would appear to date back almost to the beginnings of the hotel itself.

It’s worth spending a night in Burra, but don’t even think about staying in non-heritage accommodation. Paxton Square Cottages are a significant group of attached buildings that encircle a whole block of the town.The area surrounded by the cottages is thus large, and a century and a half ago would have been the site of carefully tended vegetable plots. The cottages were built by benevolent mine owners to house working families – the first such project in Australia. Hitherto, the miners and their kin had been resident in primitive dugouts, which can still be visited today. By the standards of modern accommodation, the cottages are large. Occupied by the standard size mid-19th century family, however, they would probably have felt less capacious. Guests will only occasionally be disturbed, as this writer was, by visitors peering through the cottage windows or knocking at the door to ask if they are open for inspection.

A notch upmarket, and away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Burra, are the Burra Heritage Cottages. Host Barry Wright will fill in any gaps there may still be in your knowledge of the town.

It’s a tourist town without the tack. There’s little that’s remotely “touristy” about the place.While you’ll find plenty of people willing to guide you in the right direction, there are no guided tours and you’ll have to hunt around for a souvenir t-shirt.

Burra exists now partly to serve the local farming community but equally because its remarkable state of preservation draws large numbers of tourists.Air New Zealand has just introduced direct flights to Adelaide. While that city itself has much to offer the heritage-minded visitor, Burra is South Australia’s real gem, and just a two-hour drive due north of the South Australian capital.