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Ghost Towns of South Australia




The ghost towns detailed here are significant examples but not all the examples of the ghost towns in Australia. They have been included either for their historic significance, or because they have other significance which is detailed in the text.



Beltana (SA Flinders Ra.)
Beltana is an old railway town on the western fringe of the Flinders Ranges. Today, it is a historical reserve off the main Hawker-Leigh Creek road. The detour is worth it. Many of the town’s buildings are being or have been restored, making Beltana a time-capsule of the I9th century. These include the original Beltana Homestead (1855), Police Station (1881), Post Office and Telegraph (1875), Bush Hospital (1898) and School (1882).

The “Smith of Dunesk Mission Church” was opened in 1895 and was the base from which Rev. John Flynn pioneered the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the Australian Inland Mission. Beltana was also the base for pastoralists Thomas Elder and Robert Ban-Smith, co-founders of Elders. In the early days it was a camel breeding station. When the railway was replaced in 1956, Beltana slowly fell into disuse. Note: the buildings in Beltana are privately-owned and are generally not open to the public.
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  • Inneston (SA Yorke Peninsula)
    The tip of Yorke Peninsula was the scene of a major mining venture which began back in 1913. William Innes, who discovered huge deposits of gypsum in the area, staked a mining claim and began exploiting the minerals he had found. He began to mine near Cape Spencer and with his brother formed the Peninsula Plaster Company and shipped the gypsum to Melbourne until 1916 when it was processed on site. Very soon he had built a Post Office, a Manager’s House and assorted cottages for his workers and the village of Cape Spencer was born.
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    • Blinman (SA Flinders Ra.)
      At the northern end of the Flinders Ranges National Park, Blinman was a thriving copper town between 1862 and 1830. Robert Blinman’s discovery of the metal in 1859 built up high hopes for the future of the town that bears his name. Some old mine machinery, early buildings and an historic cemetery remain as a reminder of the town’s history.
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      • Farina (SA outback)
        On the edge of the desert in the far north of South Australia, it is situated on the aligmnent of the original Ghan railway, 26 km north of Lyndhurst and 55 km south of Marree where the Oodnadatta Track and the Birdsville Track commence. Encouraged by a series of unusually wet winters in the 1880s, many optimistic farmers settled here, hoping that rain follows the plough. It was believed that it would be good for growing wheat and barley, however normal rainfall is nowhere near enough to grow these crops. Such was not to be.
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        • Terowie (SA central north)
          A designated historic former railway town which marked the northern region’s change of railway gauge. Terowie came into existence as part of the railway network which was built in South Australia in the late 19th century. There are old hardware stores and blacksmith’s shops in the main street which have all the charm of something from the 1880s.
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          • Ghost Towns of the Nullarbor Plain
            On a map you will see a plethora of names noting remote communities once home to the railway men, fettlers and anyone else who could scrape together a living around the railway line. Very little of these settlements remains. A rubble of stones might demark an old water bore, sometimes even the outline of a stone hut is often all that can be seen today. Some sites with tourist or historic value have been partially preserved – such as the site of the Prisioner of War camp which housed 300 Italian prisoners of war who worked on the maintenance of the line during World War II. Others, long since deserted, have been razed by bulldozers.
Echoes of The Goldrush
The picture Hollywood paints in the movies of ghost towns as complete settlements, with abandoned buildings left fully furnished and in immaculate condition, is totally unrealistic, especially in places like Australia where extreme weather conditions, bushfires and the encroaching bush has turned many an abandoned settlement into little more than a pile of ruins. On Australian goldfields, most miners lived in tents; when the gold began to peter out, they simply packed up and moved on. All that was left were any substantial shops, hotels and public buildings that had been erected, a few streets in the bush along with mullock heaps and abandoned mine shafts and mining equipment.

Just about every 19th century ghost town in Australia burst into life and faded into oblivion just as quickly as a result of mining, particularly gold mining. Some gold mining towns with a short productive life declined significantly in the decades after the gold rush as other towns in the district continued to grow. The small township of Creswick, just north of Ballarat, for example, had a population of 25,000 during the peak of its gold rush. Like Clunes, further north, it was a huge mining community now reduced to around one tenth of its size.

Heathcote, the centre of the McIvor diggings in Victoria, had sprung up as a mining village of 30,000 diggers in 1852 and was deserted a decade later. With only a few buildings still standing, the ghost towns of Home Rule and Gulgong, near Mudgee in New South Wales, are only shadows of their former brief glory in the roaring days of the 1860s and 70s.

Perhaps the greatest example of calamity to befall a once great mining centre is the town of Coolgardie in Western Australia, where vast quantities of gold were discovered and largely exhausted for the individual prospector in a short time. The remoteness of the region did little to encourage continued growth, despite the arrival of the railway line in 1896. Coolgardie sparked the greatest gold rush in Australian history and grew rapidly from the first discovery of gold in 1863 to become the third largest town in the state after Perth and Fremantle. By the turn of the century water was being piped to the city. However, mining operations were already moving to nearby Kalgoorlie, where the gold deposits were much larger.

The town, which had a peak population of around 15,000, had ceased to be a municipality by 1921. The population fell dramatically and, at one point, had declined to less than 200 people before a brief revival in gold prices during the 1980s. Coolgardie’s main promenade, wide enough to allow long camel trains to turn around, with its elaborate 19th century hotels and office blocks, stands at odds with its present status – reflecting both the great riches and the impermanence of the gold rush era.



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