‘Little Cornwall’-Moonta
Now in South Australia, I have just returned from a 2-day trip to Australia’s ‘Little Cornwall”, the triangle of Moonta, Kapunda and Burra. Moonta and Burra have just been awarded ‘National Listing’ status, the next stage to being granted World Heritage Status, which could link them with the World Heritage Sites of Cornish Mining. Moonta has a wonderful red landscape of spoil heaps, called ‘The Slimes’, a railway which takes you through the sites, and a great Museum. It also preserved much of its Cornish heritage in the form of Methodist chapels, bands and choirs, all well-documented in the Museum. The mining landscape has great ‘Precipitation ponds’, a kind of alchemic process where copper sticks to old cast iron. I really liked the exhibit in the Museum which showed a wombat discovering copper!
