Historic Inneston with Ron Kandelaars: In the Yorke Peninsula region of South Australia
Inneston National Park is one of the most visited Parks in South Australia and with good reason. Innes offers some of the most spectacular coastal scenery in the State but back in the early part of last century the crashing surf and steep cliffs served only to remind the first European settlers just how isolated they really were.
It was at the foot of Yorke Peninsula that men like Bill Innes, Andrew Stenhouse and Graham Bell, decided to build a jetty at what would become known as Stenhouse Bay. It would be the first major project in an ambitious mining venture to export salt and gypsum from a lake five kilometres away. By 1913 the town of Inneston was gradually taking shape.
According to Park Ranger, Caroline Paterson, the peace and tranquillity of the salt lake and its surrounding tea-tree forest was soon shattered as the gypsum miners went to work with explosives.
"Gypsum was blasted from the salt lake after it had been pumped dry," explained Caroline. "Huge slabs of rock were then broken into more manageable pieces by men using picks and shovels. It was back-breaking work especially in the searing heat of summer."
The workers didn't have to travel far from the remote little town that hugs the lake. In it's heyday more than 150 miners and their families lived in the scattered collection of limestone and tin dwellings known as Inneston.
Today it's a ghost town but between 1913 and 1927 it was producing plaster materials for many of Adelaide's classic villas.
"It was about 95% pure which meant it was some of the purest in Australia," said Caroline. 'It was top quality gypsum far better suited to the building industry rather than being used to break down clay as are some other deposits in the state.'
These days the town is surrounded by a network of walking trails which take you through the story of Inneston. There's the plaster factory and its crumbling ruins, the nearby school and storeroom and a sweet little post office restored by the Friends of Innes National Park.
There were also several by-products manufactured at Inneston and probably the most famous was chalk. If you went to school in the sixties and seventies you may well remember the famous Bellco Chalk brand.
As you wander through the crumbling limestone ruins you get a sense of what life was like.
Take the Thomson Pfitzner Trail that follows the course of the old railway line that connected Inneston to the port of Stenhouse Bay. It winds it's way through mallee scrub on the trail that Bill Thomson and Adolf Pfitzner followed as they guided their Clydesdale horses pulling heavily laden carts. Sometimes there were derailments and bagged gypsum would set in the rain and sun. Initially the trail was a very primitive affair.
"Originally the line was made out of stringy bark.' Said Caroline. "It was eventually replaced by steel rails and they had Clydesdales pulling the trolleys. Later they were replaced by engines."
By the late 1920s the supply of gypsum in the lake began to diminish. The town was moved to nearby Stenhouse Bay and the miners set to work retrieving gypsum from the adjacent Marion Lake.
When they left Inneston many of the buildings fell on hard times but in recent years the town's undergone a partial renaissance. The Engineer's Lodge can accommodate up to two families, while Norfolk Lodge, one of the old miner's cottages offers basic yet comfortable accommodation for up to four.
They are just two of a host of holiday rental options at Historic Inneston. Contact the Park Headquarters for details.
Inneston Historic Village
Yorke PeninsulaThe Engineer's Lodge
Accommodates two families
Norfolk Lodge
Accommodates four peopleNational Park Headquarters
Phone (08) 8854 3200
