Moonta and its mining heritage with Lisa McAskill: In the Yorke Peninsula region of South Australia

It's a cold winter's morning and in Bev Cawthorn's kitchen, the old wood stove is working a treat. The scones are in the oven and the kettle's on the boil. No matter how hard I tried, Bev wouldn't share the secret of her recipe though.

Stoking the fire and brewing the tea is all part of a ritual for Bev as serves patrons at her Wattle Grove Cottage Tearooms on the outskirts of Moonta. The original Cornish miner's cottage hasn't changed much since the days when the early miners would have left the kitchen for a day down the pit.

"As far as I know it hasn't been altered other than being rendered on the outside," said Bev. "The walls and everything are still original. They've been patched but they're still the original."

An unusual feature of the kitchen is a strangely curved ceiling. You notice the doorways are low too.

"They were obviously little people," said Bev. "About five foot one, five foot two was the average height."

That would have been a bonus when you see the old photos of the early Cornish miners who had to scramble down confined spaces in search of copper.

The frantic scramble to stake a claim for what would become one of the most profitable mines in the world makes for a fascinating read in book one of Tony Brook's "Curve of the Earth" trilogy.

It tells the tale of how the wealthy landowner Walter Watson Hughes sent a jackeroo named Horne on a midnight ride to lodge a miner's claim. It was a mad race to beat another syndicate, which included the drunken shepherd who'd made the copper find in the first place.

"Horne takes off for Adelaide and rides all through the night," explained Tony. "He got there (Adelaide) and was the first in the queue … So Walter Watson Hughes owned a mine which was worth incalculable amounts of dollars by today's standards.

"The Cornish said … it was the 'throne of old King Copper' … and they were quite right."

In Bev's tearooms with our devonshire teas, Tony, a self published author who has a passion for the history of his adopted home, recounts how the Cornish story has long fascinated him.

"Being an English person myself I had no idea that Cornwall had been recreated on the other side of the world. That's why I call the series 'The Curve of the Earth' - they came over the curve of the earth."

And they went to work in Burra, Moonta, Kapunda and Broken Hill and established communities like Kadina and Wallaroo. They might be farming and holiday towns now but back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries life here was anything but a picnic for the miners.

"A 40 year old miner was an old miner. But over here the Cornish could buy land, which is something they couldn't possibly do in England. Here, they could buy land and they could move onto the land and due course with the aid of superphosphate they became great farmers. They did so much for the state," said Tony.

At Wattle Grove Cottage you can wander around an old miner's garden and see touches of old England. And out the front there's a view of the mine - a reminder of why the home was built in the first place.

"They lived cheek by jowl," said Tony. "In this small area that is now a cleared paddock, there would have been at least two hundred houses. Two hundred cottages of fairly big Cornish mining families."

Much of old Moonta may have disappeared but much remains at Bev Cawthorn's Wattle Grove Cottage.

And for a real insight into early Cornish life grab a copy of Tony's Trilogy, "Curve of the Earth." They are available at the Moonta and Kadina Visitor Information Centres.

Wattle Grove Cottage Tearooms
Karkarilla Rd
Moonta Mines
Open Weekends & Public Holidays
Devonshire Teas $5 per person

"The Curve of the Earth"
By Tony Brooks
Available at Kadina and Moonta Visitors Information Centres