Burra, Goyder Regional Council, South Australia, Australiai

Regional Level Types
Burra	Town
Goyder Regional Council	Council
South Australia	State
Australia	Country

Burra is a pastoral centre and historic tourist town in the mid-north of South Australia. It lies east of the Clare Valley in the Bald Hills range, part of the northern Mount Lofty Ranges, and on Burra Creek. The town began as a single company mining township that, by 1851, was a set of townships (company, private and government-owned) collectively known as "The Burra". The Burra mines supplied 89% of South Australia's and 5% of the world's copper for 15 years, and the settlement has been credited (along with the mines at Kapunda) with saving the economy of the struggling new colony of South Australia. The Burra Burra Copper Mine was established in 1848 mining the copper deposit discovered in 1845. Miners and townspeople migrated to Burra primarily from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Germany. The mine first closed in 1877, briefly opened again early in the 20th century and for a last time from 1970 to 1981.

When the mine was exhausted and closed the population shrank dramatically and the townships, for the next 100 years, supported pastoral and agricultural activities. Today the town continues as a centre for its surrounding farming communities and, being one of the best-preserved towns of the Victorian era in Australia, as a historic tourist centre.

Burra is located within the Hundred of Kooringa a few kilometres inside Goyder's Line, near Burra, Baldina and Gum creeks. It lies within the Temperate Grassland of South Australia.

The main body of copper ore formed between two geological faults in broken dolomite rocks. The orebody was up to 70 metres (ca. 230 ft) wide and mainly consisted of green malachite and blue azurite veins and nodules amongst the host rock. The malachite and azurite were formed from copper sulphide minerals, by a process known as "secondary enrichment". This process took millions of years to convert the low grade copper sulphide ore, which was probably created 300 to 400 million years ago during the last period of vulcanism near Burra.

The name applied to what is now the town of Burra has changed over time. The Burra Burra Copper Mine was named after the Burra Burra Creek that flows through the town. From at least 1851 the collection of townships near the mine became referred to as "The Burra". The town of Burra was officially formed in 1940 by a notice in the South Australian Government Gazette with the consolidation of the mostly culturally-based townships of Redruth, Aberdeen, New Aberdeen, Hampton, Copperhouse, Kooringa, Llwchwr, and Lostwithiel.

The name Burra Burra has been asserted to have come from numerous sources. As early as July 1843, when the locality was already a sheep outstation for pastoralist William Peter of Manoora, it was known as Burrow Creek. Despite that obvious (though misspelt) connection to the indigenous Ngadjuri people, a later theory persistently postulates that it comes from the Hindustani for 'great great', used by Indians shepherds working for another early pastoralist, James Stein, to refer to creek. The name could also have come from Stein's home country of Scotland or a number of Aboriginal languages. A so-called 'English Burra Burra' was discovered in 1851 in Devon in the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape; possibly coincidentally several ancient placenames such as Burrator in Devon and Burraton in Cornwall occur nearby; also possible origins for the name. A Burra Burra mine is located in Tennessee and named after the Australian one.

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Wikipedia:	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burra,_South_Australia
Wikidata ID:	Q1000133
GeoNames ID:	2075308

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