THE Blinman welcoming committee was waiting to greet us when we rolled into the northern Flinders Ranges’ hamlet today.
A father emu and four almost-grown chicks were standing in the middle of the road and, because it’s so quiet in the Flinders Ranges at this time of the year, we stopped in the middle of the asphalt to get a closer look at the clan.
It seems the men have the child-minding responsibilities in the emu world and this old man was taking his brood along the road so they could peck at the insects hiding in the gravel shoulders.
The family seemed to be as interested in us as we were in them, and came close to the car to peer through the windscreen at us, and got so close we could see how the brown and cream feathers covering their bodies blended to form perfect camouflage.
After a few minutes they crossed back and disappeared into the ditch by the side of the road, perhaps seeking some shade to hide from the outback heat.
Blinman is the highest settlement in South Australia, 500km north from Adelaide at the very top of the Wilpena Road that winds past the eastern slopes of the Flinders Ranges, and it has a population of just 22 people who live in the collection of shacks set on the sunbaked hills.
The first white people arrived in this part of the world back in the 1850s, establishing a property called Angorichina Station beside one of the few trails that stretched north from Port Augusta, and the place became a busy sheep station with a team of shepherd’s charged with looking after the animals as they roamed seeking food and water.
One of these shepherds was Robert Blinman and on one hot afternoon, when he was perched on a rock on the side of a hill watching his flock, he noticed a copper reef and realised there was more to the Flinders Rangers than red rocks.
He teamed up with two mates to raise the £10 needed to secure the mining rights but rather than go to work they sat on the licence for two years and then sold the plot to an English company for £70,000, a transaction the locals joke is the only time anyone made a clear profit from the mine.
The town’s population rose and fell with the copper prices over the next five decades and while there were 1500 people living in Blinman in 1869 that number dropped to just 200 when the mine closed between 1874 and 1882, then rose to 500 when production began again in 1888, and sits at just 22 residents today.
The locals banded together a few years ago to restore the original Blinman Copper Mine and now visitors can walk through the old shafts to learn how the Cornish miners that migrated to this part of the world toiled below the surface.
There are also a collection of marked walking routes around the town which wind past the dozens of historical and significant locations in this friendly hamlet including the old hospital which accommodated most of the town’s population when a diphtheria epidemic happened in 1872.
The original cemetery is just across the road – obviously placed for convenience – but only three graves remain with the old mine’s supervisor spending big bucks on sturdy stones after his wife and two of children died during their time in Blinman.
There isn’t much to like about Blinman, it’s hot and dusty, but I do like it.
There’s so much history here, the residents are friendly and keen to show travellers around their little town, and being in a place that’s just so remote has a buzz of frontier adventure about it.
And it’s beautiful, in a hot and dusty way, and rusty old buildings are lovely when the golden light of a hot Flinders Ranges’ afternoon settles on the scorched landscape.
