Remembering the significant: St John's Kapunda, South Australia

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. 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 or to the work of Mary MacKillop in the town. St John's was established in 1850 about three miles (5km) from Kapunda 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 the graveyard still-the pale figure of a young girl, looking for her baby, her footsteps echoing across the lonely plains at night. Despite the fact Ruby Bland was never at the St John's reformatory, such stories have led to anti- Catholic sentiment, the demolition of the remaining buildings at the site in 2002, unrelenting vandalism and desecration of graves, and even ghost tourism, which are perpetuating local urban myths. This paper explores the history of St John's and aims to chronicle the significant aspects of the site, which are unknown to many. It also summarises results from archaeological research that focused on the reformatory phase of its use and can help provide further insight into the reality of life at St Joh