Sunny Corner plan

Following on from my earlier post here is a plan of the Sunny Corner site.

Digitising Naas

Over the last two weeks I have returned again to the work I originally did for my thesis on squatting landscapes. I was always unhappy with how my analysis of the landscape worked out feeling that with Geographical Information Systems I should have been able to do more. in the end my GIS analysis was pretty pathetic.

However twelve years on (is it that long???) I am up and digitising Parish maps again and trying to make the Parish maps fit the topography of the area. This time instead of digitising paper maps with a special machine in a room at Uni  I am sitting in the office digitising scanned images of the Parish Plans using ArcGIS on my computer. I also have digital data for the ACT landscape in the form of contours and watersheds …etc. If things need to be clarified most Crown Lands can be ordered on line and delivered in about 5 min (I did this on Saturday night).

Things are progressing I have now got the Parishes of Tharwa and Naas done so I am about 1/3 the way through.  

(above is a section of the Parish of Naas)

One of the other things I can do now is search some of the selectors in the Australian Newspapers so once I finished Naas I searched some of the selectors like James Patrick Tong. He turns out to be Irish and to have has several court cases which are fully reported in the Queanbeyan papers giving colour to the people whose properties I have digitised.

Sunny despite the rain

Well after several days solid work (spread out over 6 months) I have finished the search of the Digitised Australian Newspapers for information regarding the Sunny Corner Silver mine. I have clipped the information into a MS Word document which is 111 pages and has 63,959 words! Supporting this is another smaller document on Mitchell’s Creek (the name Sunny Corner had prior to silver being discovered) plus two largish files of Mines Department Records. Downloaded from DIGS.

There was an earlier history of Sunny Corner by Vicki Powys published in 1989 (Powys 1989). It is an excellent historical study. However since Powys research, the on-line revolution has arrived. So much hitherto hidden or difficult to research information has become available on-line.

When I did my first research in late 2008 I had access to Powys book and the Mines Department Records (via DIGS). The digital Australian Newspapers project was only just beginning meaning that I got some accounts of Sunny Corners that were reprinted in the Courier Mail. Last year, when I started this current research, I decided to search the digitised Australian Newspapers systematically and comprehensively as hundreds of papers had been added. Notable among these were the Sydney Morning Herald, the Town and Country Journal and the Bathurst Free Press which covered Sunny Corner.

Newspapers have been available for historians for many years but the difficulty has always been the immense task of systematically searching the newspapers for items of interest to a particular topic. The searchable Australian Newspapers allows a detailed searching of available newspapers so that general topics such as “silver smelting” can be searched as well as “Sunny Corner” or more specifically individuals like “John LaMonte”. This tool has transformed historical research by allowing a more systematic search across a number of publications in seconds.

Supporting such research is also the invaluable Google and the less known Internet Archive which contains numerous on-line copies of old manuals on arcane topics but which tell much about the process of silver smelting and other methods of processing silver-lead and zinc ore prior to the invention of froth floatation.

The Challenge

The challenge now is to turn these words into some form of understanding of Sunny Corner and the mining that occurred there in a reasonable number of words without getting bogged down in the detail.

Experimenting with location

I am experimenting with adding the location of a post to this page.

Here is a picture of a slightly belligerent seagull at Cockatoo Island.(taken November 2007)

This is a good approach although it is difficult to pin point exactly where the seagull was.

The Bing Map is at its max zoom in and it is really difficult to insert the pushpin.

As I edit the posts using Windows Live it will only accept MS’s silly Bing maps (have you ever heard of a sillier name?). Anyway the experiments continue.

The Cannon that isn't the one at Yeppoon

Following on from the previous posts showing a 6” Breach loading Armstrong gun on a hydro-pneumatic carriage, I thought I’d tell a bit of the story of the cannon that features in the Yellow Pages add. The add shows a cannon inspector inspecting a large gun and commenting that “one of these went off at Yeppoon a few years back”.

The gun being measured is one of two 1867 Armstrong RML guns on the foreshore at Williamstown (there are two more at Fore Gellibrand). RML stands for rifled muzzle loader and therein lies the story.

Newcastle (UK) industrialist and inventor William Armstrong was inspired by reports from the Crimean War to develop improvements to British artillery. There are three major improvements attributed to Armstrong; the use of rifling, breach loading and the “build up” method of construction using wrought iron hoops. These produced a lighter more accurate artillery piece and Armstrong’s weapons were tested and adopted in the period 1855-58. 

The original weapons were smaller pieces such as 40 pounders but despite some misgivings about the forces involved Armstrong was persuaded to make 110 pounders for the Royal Navy without trials.    

During the bombardment of these fortifications at Kagoshima in 1862 some of the Royal Navy’s Armstrong guns suffered from the breach mechanism failing.

By this time some improvements were made in shells which facilitated the muzzle loading of rifled guns and Palliser developed a method for inserting wrought iron rifled barrels into old cast iron cannon converting them into rifled muzzle loaders so the Armstrong breach loader was discontinued and Armstrong produced RML weapons from his factory at Elserwick. He produced some very large weapons indeed probably reaching the limits of what was practical using gunpowder and wrought iron.

Here is one of the Williamstown guns in all its glory.

But lacking any real context.

It is easy for the “Battlefield Archaeologist” when the manufacturer puts so much information on the weapon.

The Armstrong guns mounted on the H-P mountings were a generation on from the RML’s they had a new improved breach mechanism and were made from steel.

Steel? Well in the 1850’s steel making on a large scale only had just been developed with the development of the Bessemer converter but a decade or more was needed to develop a steel that would take the stresses in artillery tubes so the original Armstrong guns were wrought iron.   

More Taiaroa Head

The breach of the Disappearing Gun was working so I borrowed Janes camera and took some video of the guide (and I think Neville Ritchie) operating the breech.

Closing the breech

Locking

The development of a successful breech mechanism was the key to development of modern artillery. Armstrong’s original breech-loaders exploded at the Battle of Kagoshima in 1862 (part of my Japanese work) setting back development several decades. I thought showing the breech on a later gun might be of interest.

The Disappearing Gun - Taiaroa Head, Otago Peninsula, New Zealand

The Disappearing gun is a familiar and intriguing weapon mounted in major fortifications in Australia and New Zealand. It was the outcome of mid-19^th century technological advances in weaponry such as the increasing size and power of marine and coastal artillery, the development of armoured steam ships negating the defensive power of tides and wind and the development of operational research analysing the impact of Civil War bombardments of coastal forts and the results of the famous battle of Alexandria (in 1882). All this work lead to the conclusion that coastal artillery needed to be better protected if only to preserve the crews serving the weapons. This conclusion resulted in a variety of new fortification and gun mounting designs which were developed from the mid-1860s.

A disappearing gun is one where a rifled, breach loading, gun is mounted on a hydro-pneumatic carriage in which the recoil is checked by cylinders containing liquid and air, the air when compressed furnishing the power for restoring the gun to the firing position. The gun was swung above the parapet of the mounting and pointed and elevated from below and then fired. The recoil swung the gun below the parapet where it was reloaded. A metal (armoured) shield covered most of the gun pit in British designs. The crew was protected below the parapet and the gun itself would have been a difficult target to hit.

The British design used throughout the colonies was by Armstrong a company with expertise in hydraulics and of course pioneering the breach loading design. The “Disappearing Gun” was sold to the colonies in the mid 1880’s as well as to China and Thailand. A similar design the Buffington–Crozier Disappearing Carriage was adopted by the United States for coastal artillery from the mid-1890s and some saw service against the Japanese.

The gun in its loading position. The gun can be trained using the wheel visible in the photo. The band around the mounting gives the angle.

I was involved in looking at the fortifications in Victoria in the 1980s when hydro-pneumatic mountings were discovered and there were plans for reconstructing South Channel fort. I had also seen batteries in Sydney and Queensland where disappearing guns were mounted. I knew of the batteries at North Head at Auckland which I had briefly visited and that there were other batteries at Canterbury. Curiously each State claims their battery was the first or prototype mounting!

During the 2011 Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology Conference the pre-conference tour visited the Otago Peninsula. At Taiaroa Head, which dominates the narrow entrance to Otago Harbour, extensive fortifications were constructed following the usual fears of a Russian invasion. In 1885 the New Zealand Government bought 10 8” and 13 6” disappearing guns from Armstrong’s Elswick 0rdnance Company. The gun at Taiaroa Head is a 6” with a range of about 6600 ft. The propellant used was initially gunpowder and the shells were the typical range of shells using gunpowder. Later Cordite MD was used as a propellant and presumably more advanced shell were used.

Although obsolete by 1900 in New Zealand they were manned during World War 1 but abandoned about 1925. However unlike other guns the gun was not cut up for scrap metal and was recommissioned during World War 2, and later completely restored by the Otago Antique Arms Association. The mounting site is amid an Albatross colony.

  Detail of the shield protecting the crew from shrapnel.

The breach in its closed position.

The breach open showing the screw mechanism.