Traditional Owners

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.

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

All this took place, however, 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.