Baker’s Flat
The excavation of a lost village in South Australia casts new light on the story of the Irish in Australia.
THERE WAS NOTHING unusual about Irish peasants resisting forced evictions from their homes in Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. Such scenes were common during England’s protracted and bitter occupation of its island neighbour. That similar battles also occurred on Australian soil reveals a little-known episode in the stor y of the Irish diaspora Down Under.
Susan Arthure, a PhD candidate in the archaeology department of Flinders University, Adelaide, has been conducting research since 2013 at the site of a traditional Irish village once known as Baker’s Flat, near Kapunda in South Australia. The discovery of remnants of the small community is highly significant, according to Susan.
“The Irish presence in SA has been overlooked to a degree, because it’s been easier to group them in with the British. There were never as many Irish here as in other states, but in this particular part of rural SA, instead of settling in the city, they had the opportunity to live in a place on a comparable scale to Irish townlands,” she says.
The size and quality of the land settled at Baker’s Flat was familiar to these new arrivals so they did what they had done in Ireland, which was to re-create the traditional clachan method of living in a cluster community. “It’s the first one we have found in Australia, and it makes us look at Irish settlement here in a different way,” Susan says.
Baker’s Flat was established in about 1854 by Irish immigrants seeking work in the new copper mine at Kapunda, 65km north of Adelaide. They were among millions who fled Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine of 1845–1852, when the potato crop, the staple food of the rural Irish, failed in successive seasons. The immigrants settled close to the mine, providing essential cheap labour, and squatted, rent-free, on a vacant block within walking distance of, but separated from, the town.
Here they built typical Irish whitewashed stone cottages and farm buildings close together in a fairly haphazard layout. They ran cattle, pigs, goats, poultry and crops according to a traditional cooperative farming method known as the rundale system. As the mine prospered through the 1860s and early 1870s, so did the clachan, with more than 500 people
and between 50 and 60 houses recorded there. Contemporary accounts, including court records, suggest life was led along customary Irish lines with strong Roman Catholic values, traditional singing and dancing and the national sport of hurling. Negative observations fed into pre-existing antiIrish sentiment and stereotypes with reports of drunkenness, infighting and insanitary conditions.
As the mine’s fortunes declined, the landowners tried many times to reclaim their property, but the Irish were having none of it. An old Kapunda mural, since demolished, depicted an attempt to remove tenants in 1880. It shows the women chasing off the bailiffs with boiling water, pitchforks and brooms. Such bids were rebuffed again and again. Affidavits collected during an 1892 court case, Forster et al. v. Fisher, show the extent to which the clachan’s collectivism ensured the long-term survival of the community. Residents were offered “reasonable terms” to buy out their land, but all refused, citing possible social exclusion if they were to act independently of the clachan.
The last resident of Baker’s Flat died there in 1945. The descendants of those first immigrants had long since moved on, and in many cases established themselves as farmers on their own land. The site was later razed for agriculture, and memories of the clachan faded beyond the immediate Kapunda district and the family histories of the descendants.
Susan Arthure, an Irish-born Australian, was alerted to the Baker’s Flat story by colleagues who knew of her special interest in Irish settlement. With the blessing of the current landowner, she conducted an archaeological survey at the site in 2013 and observed piles of rubble lying on the surface.
In 2016 –17, archaeological excavations uncovered semi-underground dwellings, or dugouts, consistent with old Irish construction methods, in which houses were built into hillsides and featured thatched roofs. Students working on the dig also unearthed fragments of window glass, ceramics, fabric and jewellery.
Susan’s painstaking research has created a fascinating picture of the life and times of a traditional Irish clachan existing as a community and farming cooperatively in Australia over a period of almost a century.
Like many others who arrived here to escape poverty, persecution, or to seek a better life, the Irish of Baker’s Flat brought aspects of their culture to their new home. They ultimately adapted to their surroundings, forging a new way of life and helping shape Australia’s national identity.