The Almanda Silver Mine and Mackereth's Cottage

Some time in early 1868, a German mining captain named William Ey was working at the Port smelting works when he noticed a heap of ore left to rot beside one of the furnaces. It had been there for years, brought in from some failed copper venture and discarded as not worth smelting. Ey examined it closely and saw something the copper men had missed: silver. He made experiments to see whether it could be drawn out by amalgamation, and when the results satisfied him, he began to ask where the ore had come from. A strange coincidence led him to approach Mr Gowan, one of the former proprietors of the failed copper company. He had not even known the name of the mine, let alone its locality — he had imagined it might be somewhere near the Burra. The next day a mineral claim was taken out in the names of Ey and Gowan. That event, as the South Australian Register later reflected, was "the commencing of silver-mining in South Australia."

The mine in question was the Wheal Maria, opened in 1850 on a section of land about eighteen miles south-east of Adelaide, near a creek the early settlers called Scott's Creek. Its discovery came when the wheel of one of the settlers' bullock wagons on its way to the Adelaide markets broke off pieces of rock beside the creek, exposing copper mineralisation. The copper company had laboured without success, sent a quantity of ore to the Port smelting works, and eventually wound up. When Ey and Gowan went out to examine the ground in the first months of 1868, they found an old shaft — sunk to fifteen fathoms (27 metres) — with stopes cut in front and behind it, and a series of pits and a tunnel on the western slope where the copper company had traced the lode before giving up. Nothing on the surface suggested the value that lay in the rock beneath.

The land belonged to the Mackereth family. George Mackereth, a farmer from Devon, was twenty-eight years old when he arrived in Adelaide in 1838, two years after Proclamation. Sarah O'Brien had made the same voyage, coming out on the barque Royal Admiral; the couple married soon after at Trinity Church on North Terrace. In those first years, the Mackereth family joined their neighbours the Hills in harvesting native timber from the surrounding scrub, some of it carted to Adelaide for use in the city's construction. Once the land was cleared, George planted onions and potatoes on the flats by the creek, and put in three fruit trees — an apple, a pear, and a mulberry — that would survive into the twenty-first century. Bullock wagons hauled the produce on the two-day journey to the Adelaide markets. He built working relationships with local Kaurna people, sharing food and water with them; when he made the two-day journey to Adelaide to sell his produce, Kaurna people would camp around the cottage to keep Sarah company and watch over the place in his absence. Mackereth was formally granted Section 285 of the Hundred of Noarlunga in November 1854, though the cottage almost certainly predates that grant — Cotter's Almanack of 1843 already has him at Scott's Bottom, and the 1855–56 Clarendon District Council assessment books note a hut among his improvements that those who later examined the building concluded was incorporated into the present structure.

The cottage grew in at least three stages, its sandstone rubble walls and large roughly squared quoins built for durability rather than show. The most distinctive feature was the roof: an unusual M-shape spanning two parallel pitches, clad in shingles that by 1978 were already the third covering to sit over the original frame — the split shakes and a later layer of corrugated iron still visible beneath. A creek ran along the back; two small attic windows looked to the north.

George Mackereth died on 27 June 1864, after being attacked by his bull and sustaining blood poisoning. The Adelaide Observer recorded the fact in a single line:

Mr. George Mackereth, an old colonist of 27 years, aged 54.

Adelaide Observer, 2 July 1864.

Ten children had been raised in the sandstone cottage on Scott's Creek. Sarah Ann, then forty-four, was left with Section 285 and whatever the land could return. She held it alone for the four years before the silver rush began.

A second group of investors — Levi, Beck, and W. A. Hughes — had joined Ey and Gowan soon after the original claim was staked, and in June 1868 the group visited the mine together to oversee a decisive trial. About four and a half tons of ore from the old shaft's waste heap were sent into Adelaide, processed at Wentzel's mill, and yielded an average of thirty ounces of silver to the ton — enough to cast two ingots weighing a hundred and thirty-one ounces, which went on display at the Adelaide Stock Exchange — solid proof, for anyone who needed it, that the silver was real. That result, the Register noted, "was thought to warrant the investment of capital in machinery." In August 1868 the Almanda Silver Mining Association was formally constituted by John Beck, Phillip Levi, James Gawen, Edward Bagot, William Hughes, Frederick Blades, Alfred Hallett — whose family had run the earlier Worthing copper mine at Hallett Cove — and William Ey. The mine was placed under Captain Edward Henkel, an experienced mineralogist trained in the Hartz Mountains of Germany. Day-to-day operations fell to Gowan's son, who by January 1869 was managing the workings directly.

In September the first proper crushing from the mine itself was complete: five tons of ore had yielded a hundred and twelve ounces of retorted silver. A second crushing gave twenty-eight ounces to the ton. But hand-picked specimens from the west face of the gully had already shown something far more extraordinary in assay — averaging 325 ounces to the ton, with the richest returning 510 ounces, and one sample sent into Adelaide registering 700 ounces. Even the promoters cautioned that picked specimens were no guide to what the crush would yield; the brokers on 'Change were not inclined to caution. News spread rapidly across the colony and beyond. "Great excitement prevails," a Melbourne correspondent reported in early September, "in consequence of the report which has been circulated that gold has been discovered not far from the silver mine at Almanda." The rush that followed saw 235 mineral claims pegged across the Scott Creek area; only the Almanda and the neighbouring Potosi would be worked to any extent.

A township was laid out on Section 285 — Sarah Ann's land — with five streets and sixty-nine allotments proposed at the corner of Dorset Vale Road and Matthews Road. The entity selling the lots described itself as the Mackereth Mining Company and advertised the blocks as adjoining the mine itself, with an abundance of timber, good water, and the creek running through. It was Sarah Ann Mackereth who sold the allotments; Henry Daw purchased one of them from her directly. By mid-September a large number of temporary buildings had already gone up at the site.

A correspondent the Argus sent from Melbourne to inspect the mine in December 1868 described the journey: descend from the main Adelaide road through the stringy-bark country, leave the metal road, pick your way down a bush track into the hollow that had once been the Wheal Maria. The lode ran through the hills on either side of Scott's Creek, nearly perpendicular, about four feet broad on average, widening into richer pockets at intervals. The stone that contained the silver was unremarkable to the untrained eye — "blackened by the operation of fire," embedded in friable rock of russet brown with a greasy clay that left a greenish stain on the fingers — but with the primitive machinery then in place, the company was extracting twenty to thirty ounces a ton, and probably losing eight or ten more with the tailings.

If the average yield should be maintained at anything like twenty-five ounces per ton and upwards, the mine cannot fail to be a source of wealth to the fortunate shareholders.

Argus (Melbourne), 12 December 1868.

The machinery improved substantially in the months that followed. The old Chilian mill found at Port Adelaide — an English consignment of the gold-rush era that had waited fourteen years for a buyer, the exporter, as the correspondent drily observed, "having evidently had vague geographical notions about Bendigo and Mount Alexander" — was set aside. Two enormous tubular boilers, each twenty-six feet long and six and a half feet in diameter, replaced the original engine. A new engine made by Wyatt of North Terrace, nominally forty horsepower but capable of sixty, drove fifteen head of stamps, eighteen amalgamating pans, and nine separators housed in a galvanised iron shed a hundred and thirteen feet long. The workings extended down the gully on both sides of the creek: Bagot's lode on the east hill, Ey's tunnel driven into the west hill where the lode ran nine feet wide, and on the western face an open cut where ore was taken without underground excavation. By mid-1869 twenty-six men were employed under Captain Bennett Opie.

The shareholders were skittish from early on. In May 1869 a panic swept the Exchange when copper was found in the silver ingots; shares fell to thirty-seven shillings and kept falling. The bars the company had described as "supposed to be pure" proved on assay to contain only forty-two per cent of silver, the rest being copper and other impurities. There were recoveries and fresh reports of good ore at depth — an annual general meeting in July 1869 showed yields improving, and the week ending July 10 had seen forty tons crushed with sixty-one pounds of silver recovered — but the Association dissolved in 1871, the machinery, buildings, and plant being sold for £650.

Further work was attempted in 1877, 1881, and 1887. The engine shaft was sunk to twenty-one fathoms (38 metres), returning assays of eighty-eight to 163 ounces of silver per ton alongside traces of gold. A winze in Ey's tunnel was sunk to 23 metres before water came in too strongly for hand labour to control. By 1893 the majority of the remaining plant and machinery had been auctioned off. The Inspector of Mines who visited in November 1900 found the underground workings inaccessible from lengthy abandonment, though samples from the surface dumps still assayed at respectable grades. Over its working life, the Almanda produced an estimated ten thousand ounces of silver — some 310 kilograms — from around two thousand tons of ore.

Sarah Mackereth continued to work the farm with her children after the silver rush. In January 1882 her daughter Ellen died at Scott's Creek aged twenty-five; Sarah Ann followed two months later, in March, aged sixty-two. The property passed to the next generation, and in 1919 a sale notice described what the family had built there over eighty years: a well-built stone house of four rooms, kitchen, dairy, and outhouses; substantial stockyards; four well-fenced paddocks with running water throughout; and several acres of established fruit garden. The sale did not complete. In May 1920 the government resumed the property as crown land for the water supply authority's reservoir reserve, ending the Mackereth family's eight decades on Section 285.

Both the mine ruins and Mackereth's Cottage are now within Scott Creek Conservation Park. The stone chimney on the western side — a circular column connected by underground flue to the former boiler house, its mountings and foundations still in place alongside the remains of the crushing and treatment plant — was fenced, cleared, and signposted in the years before the conservation park was established. Ey's tunnel and the open cut of the eastern workings are accessible to visitors. Across the road from the chimney, on the section the Mackereth family had worked from the 1840s, the cottage took a different path. The National Trust maintained it until 1984, but without custodians the building was left open to vandalism, and a subsequent fire compounded the damage until very little of the structure remained. In 2001 the property passed to SA Water, the site falling within a water catchment area. In 2021 it was included in an additional eight hectares added to Scott Creek Conservation Park — land that also supports four nationally threatened orchid species and provides habitat for the southern brown bandicoot. A silver rush came and went in the space of three years. The ruins of the cottage, the creek, and the apple, pear, and mulberry trees George Mackereth planted in 1839 have outlasted it by more than a century.

Sources

• Adelaide Observer, 2 July 1864 — death notice for George Mackereth; South Australian Register, 26 July 1864 — same notice; both describe him as "an old colonist of 27 years, aged 54." Trove
• South Australian Register, 17 August 1868, p. 2 — 'The Almanda Silver Mine'; primary account of the origin of the mine; Ey and Gowan; assays; Captain Henkel; west hill specimens. Reprinted in the Geelong Advertiser, 24 August 1868. Trove
• South Australian Register, 8 October 1868, p. 4 — advertisement for the Township of Almanda (Section 285, 'Mackereth's'), issued by the Mackereth Mining Company via Townsend, Botting & Kay. Trove
• Argus (Melbourne), 12 December 1868 — 'The Almanda Silver Mine, South Australia (From Our Own Correspondent)'; first-hand account of the mine in operation, lode character, and journey to the site. Trove
• Australasian (Melbourne), 24 October 1868 — 'The Sketcher: Silver Mines in South Australia'; detailed description of machinery, lode character, and the approach from Adelaide. Trove
• Adelaide Observer, 30 January 1869 — 'Progress of the Almanda'; detailed account of the amalgamation process, new machinery plans, and mine operations; Gowan junior as manager; Ey's tunnel lode nine feet wide. Reprinted in the South Australian Register, 2 February 1869. Trove
• South Australian Register, 17 July 1869 — 'Silver: The Silver Mines'; shareholder meeting of July 12, production figures by week, machinery and workforce details. Trove
• Lionel C. E. Gee, Record of the Mines of South Australia (4th edn, Government Printer, Adelaide, 1908), p. 163 — ore assay data, shaft depths, and chronology of workings
• Hassell Planning Consultants, City of Happy Valley Heritage Review (February 1988), Items 47–48 — architectural description of Mackereth's Cottage and Almanda Mine Ruins; Major Local Significance listing
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries, From Almanda to United States: Lost Localities in the City of Onkaparinga — history of the Almanda locality, Mackereth family, and proposed township
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries, Mining Records Collection (ONR-MI-01 to ONR-MI-09) — Noarlunga mining records including the Record of Mines entry for Almanda
• City of Onkaparinga, Heritage Properties database — HP 105500; Former 'Almanda Mine' ruins, Sec Pt1671 Dorset Vale Road, Cherry Gardens
• Sale notice, 1919 — description of the Mackereth property: stone house, dairy, outhouses, stockyards, four paddocks, fruit garden; sale did not complete; property resumed as crown land May 1920
• National Trust of SA Conservation Plan — Mackereth's Cottage, Matthews Road, Dorset Vale — Cotter's Almanack 1843 (George at Scott's Bottom); 1920 crown resumption; E&WS reservoir reserve; National Trust lease 1977; formal heritage listings
• SA Department of Mines and Energy, Almanda Silver Mine: A Guide to the Walking Trail (September 1991) — authoritative source for full founder list (Beck, Levi, Gawen, Bagot, Hughes, Blades, Alfred Hallett, Ey); Captain Edward Henkel; winze depth 23 m; trail localities; Bagot's Shaft named for Edward Bagot
• T. Fabris et al., MESA Journal 82, pp. 31–39 — 'Almanda mine: mineralogy and genesis of a 19th century silver deposit'; mining history section citing Brown (1908) and Drew (1991); total life-of-mine production; £650 machinery sale; 235 claims pegged; wagon-wheel copper discovery
• Dave Walsh, Weekend Notes (South Australia) — biographical details: George Mackereth's Devon origins and 1838 arrival; Sarah O'Brien and the Royal Admiral; Trinity Church marriage; Kaurna relationships; cause of George's death; 2001 SA Water transfer; 2021 Scott Creek Conservation Park expansion