OTR: Caravaning … Day 4 👉🏻 Kadina

From Moonta, we drove the short distance to another Copper Triangle town … Kadina.

With the afternoon hours passing quickly, we skipped a wander around town and went to the Farm Shed Museum. Operated under the auspices of the National Trust, this heritage museum has a wide variety of exhibits. The grounds are fairly widespread. So much so that they asked that we provide them with a phone number in case they needed to contact us while we were out exploring the exhibits.

The museum bills itself as having “something for everyone.” True … though we only ever ran into two other people today, and they seemed to be most interested in the farm equipment. Matta House and exhibits about daily life were what garnered our attention.

Matta House, which dates back to 1863, was the residence of the manager of the Matta Matta Mine … rather short-lived as it operated for only 10 years between 1860-1870. A number of families lived in the house until 1996. It was then purchased by the Trust with the intention of establishing it as a folk museum.

We wandered through the small house — just five rooms … one of which was a later add-on. They were refurbished to represent the Late Victorian Period when copper mining in the area was at its peak. The kitchen was … on the far side of a little courtyard.

An exhibit that we found particularly interesting was Kadina’s Story … covering the social history of the town from when it was founded in 1861 … including a life-sized model of an underground mine. Sensor-triggered audio filtered from speakers, relating stories from the early days of the town.

Nothing that it was almost 4:00p, we sped up our exploration of the rest of the museum and quickly wandered through the remaining exhibits ranging from the shearing yard to the country newspaper, from agriculture to rural transportation, and more.

Why speed up? Well, for one thing, the museum was due to close soon. But also we needed to get to the campground. You see, campground offices tend to close early in Australia. If you are late and don’t have the “boom code” you are out of luck . We had a tentative reservation — pay-on-arrival and no code. Thus we didn’t want to miss the people at the office.

I’ll put your mind at rest before I end this footprint. We made it to the campground in good time!Read more