Qualla: Leigh Creek, South Australia

Leigh Creek, South Australia: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State Government Photographer, CC0. There are towns that die slowly, and there are towns that are physically picked up and relocated to get at what lies beneath them. Leigh Creek is the second kind. In the early 1980s the entire town was abandoned and rebuilt a few kilometres away, because the brown coal South Australia needed ran directly under the old streets. For decades that coal fed the state's power stations and kept the lights on. Then, in 2015, the mine closed for good - and the carefully relocated town found itself a settlement in search of a reason to exist.

Image: State Government Photographer | CC0

Leigh Creek, South Australia: Coal for a Self-Reliant State

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State Government Photographer, CC0. The seams here are a low-grade, sub-bituminous coal - hard brown coal, miners call it - lying in nested, bowl-shaped beds several metres thick. It had been known since the 19th century but went largely unworked until the 1940s, when a single political anxiety changed everything. ...

Image: State Government Photographer | CC0

Leigh Creek, South Australia: The Town That Moved

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State Government Photographer, CC0. To mine the coal beneath the original township, the whole settlement had to go. Construction of a new Leigh Creek began in 1979; by 1980 the first family had moved in, and by 1982 the old town was emptied and flooded behind a retention dam. At its peak in 1987 the relocated town ...

Image: State Government Photographer | CC0

Leigh Creek, South Australia: Bringing the Wallabies Home

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State Government Photographer, CC0. Not every story here ends in decline. South of the town, at Aroona, lies one of Australia's great quiet triumphs of land repair. By 1985 the country around Aroona Dam had been wrecked - stripped bare by rabbits and feral goats, the soil eroded to a talcum-fine dust that spawned v...

Image: State Government Photographer | CC0

Leigh Creek, South Australia: What Comes After Coal

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State Government Photographer, CC0. A mining town without its mine has to reinvent itself or fade. Leigh Creek has tried both. Proposals surfaced to extract gas from the abandoned coal seams by igniting them underground - a controversial technique that drew strong scrutiny. The town remains a service hub for the su...

Image: State Government Photographer | CC0