Many of the pages found here illustrate things as they were more than thirty years ago. I have not tried to describe the present state of the places involved even where new information has been unearthed and pages have expanded.
The reason why is that the impact of wandering stock and wildlife, the construction of railways, roads, dams and other structures, and even the deliberate destruction of buildings in the face of legislative change, is an ongoing process – things just disappear or fade away.
For example, the waterholes at Milparinka have changed considerably over the last hundred and fifty years. The process probably started as soon as non-aboriginal peoples, such as Charles Sturt, arrived. Trees, described as a pine forest by Sturt in 1844-45 , became building material and firewood. The under-story, such as the salt-bush Sturt’s sheep found so tasty, has managed to survive to a certain extent, but what has disappeared is for others to explain – it is not part of my expertise. However, the disturbed soil found its way into watercourses and eventually into the waterholes at Milparinka. Those waterholes were never particularly deep, so it did not take much for them to be silted-up. Of course, gold-seekers and their puddling machines, sluices etc. did not help, but they were not the only influence.
On a much smaller scale, the amazing scatter of small and large artifacts that used to be very obvious in places like Milparinka, Lobbs Hole and the Grey Mare Mine is much reduced. The scatter of iron bits and pieces, door knobs and locks, apparently the contents of a wooden barrel at some time, is mostly gone. The egg cup, perfume bottles, bits of a mouth-organ and reeds from a squeeze-box concertina; the tin cans that were clearly a hundred-or-so years old, the beer- tap handles from, probably, the Royal Standard hotel, broken teapots, dinner plates and Chinese bowls – all gone. As for the bigger bits – no more mine truck, stamper battery or mine head-frame, no ships’ water tank. No more “stamped iron” tanks and miniature steam-engine boilers at old stock watering places. In some places there used to be neat back-door piles of 1 “pickaxe” brand from South Australia beer bottles, all complete (except for the beer). There is perhaps one broken one at Milparinka now. (May 2021)
There is nothing particularly wrong with change 2 In fact many of us would be dead if technological, scientific and social change had not interfered , but it has had an impact upon what is left to see at the places mentioned in these pages.
- 1“pickaxe” brand from South Australia
- 2In fact many of us would be dead if technological, scientific and social change had not interfered