30 Remembering the Significant: St John’s Kapunda, South Australia Cherrie De Leiuen Introduction Kapunda was once a prosperous copper mining town located a short distance from the Barossa Valley and 75km north of Adelaide in South Australia. These days the built landscape and historical narratives stand as tributes to to the town’s founders: wealthy British and Anglo-Irish landowners and Cornish miners. But these were not the only groups who played a significant role in Kapunda’s past. The emigrant population also included substantial numbers of post-Famine Irish Catholics, many of whom were employed as mine labourers. 1 Nevertheless, Irish Catholic Kapunda is invisible. There are no obvious commemorations to one of the first Catholic churches built in South Australia, St John the Evangelist (St John’s), to the unique Irish settlement once home to hundreds at Baker’s Flat 2 or to the work of Mary MacKillop in the town. St John’s was established in 1850 about three miles (5km) from the town and was once a church and presbytery at the centre of a large, thriving Catholic parish. The buildings were later repurposed for use as a school and a Catholic girls’ reformatory run by the Sisters of St Joseph. Today, nothing remains of the St John’s site except a palm tree planted in the 1890s. Further, the Irish Catholics of Kapunda are remembered in pejorative ways, for example, St John’s suffers from the infamy of being one of Australia’s ‘most haunted’ sites. There are many stories, such as the tale of Ruby Bland, a young girl who was allegedly an inmate of the reformatory in 1909. As the story goes, after being raped by the reformatory’s resident priest Ruby became pregnant, and, not wanting the scandal to leak, the deranged priest attempted to give her an abortion but murdered her accidentally in the process. Her ghost is said to linger in 1 Given this particular narrative, it is interesting to note population numbers from the 1861 Census, which reveal that across the various Kapunda council districts, there were officially 1572 English and Welsh (which includes the Cornish) and 1023 Irish residents. There were approximately 6,500 baptisms recorded in St John’s between 1848 and 1882 (Light Parish Records, collated by Peter Swann) and there were probably more unofficial births. In terms of the gender balance, the census records demonstrate women have outnumbered men in Kapunda since the 1860s. This is important to consider given that women are not represented in any significant fashion, especially in terms of the mining story. 2 Arthure, Susan. 2014. “The Occupation of Baker’s Flat: A Study of Irishness and Power in Nineteenth Century South Australia.” M.Arch thesis, Flinders University. Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 36 (2015), 10-24