First mining in South Australia for red ochre; Aboriginal clans come a long way to trade for it over thousands of years
Parachilna/Bookatoo Gorge in the northern Flinders Ranges and (inset) an example of its red ochre that became widely prized by other Aboriginal clans in eastern and central Australia.
Inset image courtesy Museum Victoria.
The first large mining centre in South Australia was thousands of years ago at Parachilna/Bookatoo in the northern Flinders Ranges. Prized Yarrakina red ochre was the object of the mine, within the home of the Adnyamathanha clan who had to give permission for access to it.
The prized red ochre from Parachilna/Bookatoo was distributed throughout central and eastern Australia via one of oldest trade routes in the world. Red ochre (an iron oxide) was used as a pigment for art and decoration, adorning the human body during ceremonies, for rock art and to liberally coat wooden implements. Red ochre also decorated and coated jewellery and items made from feathers, vegetable fibre, animal hide and fur.
The Yarrakina red ochre from Parachilna/Bookatoo mine was said to be the blood of a sacred emu and famous over a wide region of central Australia. The Dieri people, 500 kilometres to the north in central Australia, sent armed parties of 70 to 80 men through hostile territories to barter for ochre from the Adnyamathanha. The Dieri considered Bookatoo ochre the only one suitable for their rituals and trade with other people from northern Australia.
Bookatoo ochre had a silky sheen caused by an admixture of some other element, such as free mercury (cinnabar). Items traded for the red ochre, with tribes from as far away on Cloncurry in Queenland and New South Wales, included stone axes and light spears. Visiting clans would gather near Bookatoo quarry to hold ceremonies, initiations and other important cultural events.
The mining was often done by a small group, within a clan, with special knowledge of how to correctly extract the resource. The visiting ochre miners crushed the soft rock and made it into a paste by mixing it with water or sometimes with the fat or blood of animals such as emus, possums or kangaroos. The party would return home with 20 kilograms of ochre each in possum or kangaroo skin bags.
The Aboriginal red ochre trade was disrupted, but not totally ended, from the 1850s when the track along the Warioota Creek, a major waterway through the Kuyani hills, in an area called Palthanha (Westernised to Beltana), saw the first sheep arrive from European colonisation.
From the 1860s, Adelaide-based pastoralist and parliamentarian Thomas Elder began investing in the region, with Beltana sheep becoming part of the assets of Elder, Smith & Co., one of the most powerful companies in colonial South Australia. This led to the 1863 killing by pastoralists, led by Beltana manager Captain Robert McKay, of Aboriginal ochre traders passing through on their way home from Parachilna.
The use of ochre from the northern Flinders Ranges continued through the 20th Century until the 1950s. But the ochre this time was being used to make paint by a European-owned enterprise called the Beltana Paint Mine.