This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
34.35212° S, 138.90685° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Map the Miner burned down in 2006 and was rebuilt in bronze the following year, which is a rare second life for a Big Thing.
His name is Cornish. MAP Kernow means Son of Cornwall, and the seven-metre figure stands for the Cornish miners who arrived in South Australia from the 1840s. Kapunda's copper mine was the first commercially successful metal mine in Australia, opened in 1844, and the Cornish brought the deep-mining expertise that made it work – along with a culture, an accent and a set of surnames that shaped the mid-north of the state for generations. Their descendants still fill the district's cemeteries and phone books.
Ben van Zetten sculpted the figure, completed in 1988. Eighteen years later fire destroyed it. The town rebuilt it in bronze and rededicated it in 2007 at the southern entrance to Kapunda, where it now welcomes traffic coming up from the Barossa.
That rebuilding is the more interesting half of the story. When a commercial Big Thing burns, it usually stays gone; the business takes the insurance and moves on. A community monument is different. Kapunda's miner was replaced within a year and upgraded to a permanent material in the process, which is a fairly emphatic statement about what the town thought it was losing.
South Australian tourism now recognises him among Australia's Big Things while noting he tells a story that is often overlooked – which is a fair description of Cornish migration generally.
Kapunda's mine closed in 1879, so the town has been living with the memory considerably longer than it lived with the industry. A statue that has itself been destroyed and remade fits that history rather well.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Map the Miner is a seven-metre bronze statue of a Cornish miner at the southern entrance to Kapunda, commemorating the town's copper-mining heritage. Current South Australian tourism material recognises it as one of Australia's Big Things.
ACCESS
Map the Miner stands beside the Thiele Highway at Kapunda's southern entrance, with an off-highway pull-off/parking bay and photo platform reported immediately beside the statue (a visitor account confirms safe off-road parking here), but no independently surveyed car-park coordinate distinct from the statue exists yet. Do not stop in the through lane; use the signed pull-off only.
