This is an impression of Jack and Ella Thomas’s yard, Lancelot Terrace, Moonta Mines, drawn in the 1980s. Jack (known as Janna) bred and raced champion pigeons. Ella raised goats. She was very cluey. Both were so Cornish.
Jack could just remember the end of the mines 60 years earlier. The mine owners blew up many of the mine buildings, he said, so the now-jobless families wouldn’t be able to use them.
At election times the Moonta Mines polling booth would be the only Labor booth on the Yorke Peninsula. Ella Thomas handed out the Labor ‘How To Vote’ cards and made sure you knew how to make your vote count.
The remains of a structure on the left in the picture once supported a wind generator that charged batteries which powered the lights in the house. When mains electricity reached Moonta Mines residents were not able to connect to the power until they had dismantled their wind generators.
Photographer Peter Richards lived next door and here are two of his beautiful photos of Jack and Ella, taken back then.
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 