ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA—ABC News Australia reports that Susan Arthure of Flinders University has investigated Baker’s Flat, the site of a clachan, or settlement, inhabited by as many as 500 Irish immigrants who fled the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. “The people of Baker’s Flat were predominantly poor and Catholic, and at that time in South Australia they weren’t particularly well-favored,” Arthure said. She has uncovered traces of cottages that had been whitewashed and thatched, and a round structure that she at first thought might have been used for making whitewash. But she found no evidence of burning or preparing lime, the basic ingredient in whitewash, in or around the building. A road running close to the building makes it unlikely to have been used to distill illegal whiskey, she added. An archaeologist in Ireland then suggested that the structure may have served as a sweathouse, a semi-subterranean, beehive-shaped building where arthritic pains and fevers were treated. “Sweathouses were very common in Ireland up until probably famine times,” Arthure said. “What is really exciting about the one here at Baker’s Flat is that we can look not only at how people were following the same traditions, but how they were adapting,” she concluded. To read about a mid-nineteenth century prison in Cork Harbor, go to "Letter from Ireland: The Sorrows of Spike Island."
