A little more light shed on Sunny Corner

Followers of this blog and friends will know of my on-going involvement with the Sunny Corner mining site. I thought I had pretty much mined all the Australian newspapers for relevant information. Imagine my surprise when I  found an article in Australian Town and Country Journal 23 Mar 1895: 31 on the mines at Sunny Corner.

Then I found it was illustrated!

Then I realised that apart from the Sunny Corner mine there was a rare illustration of the Silver King mine as well.

This is the Sunny Corner Mine

This is the Silver King Mine

The Silver King image gives a really good sense of where the processing plant was located in the landscape.

It is exciting to be surprised by discoveries like this.

Tramway at Sunny Corner

Some of you may know that over the last two years I have been doing some work on the former Sunny Corner mining site. Last week I was on site doing some archaeological recording prior to remediation works. While recording the lower edge of the earthworks forming the Open Roasting Pit (where the ore was roasted to make it more suitable for smelting) I came across these remains.

(yes that is the correct slope!)

Care full examination revealed these to be two timbers held apart by metal rod on top of a metal frame with a bit of rail that again keeps the rails apart at a set gauge.

Here is a detail of the metal frame with the rail “in situ”.

Not much is known about how the open roasting pits worked but from the remains it seems that a small tramway network was used to move the ore and presumably firewood around.

Not much has survived since c1889 when the Mine closed. Presumably all the good bits were salvaged for reuse elsewhere while these pieces were thrown over the edge to rust.

Because I had a sub-metre GPS with me, I can tell you that the remains are located at

Northing    6303672.578
Easting    769197.279

GPS_Height    1095.101

I imagine that this form of tramway construction would have allowed the easy realignment of the tramway during the process of roasting the ore.