The Burra Burra copper-mines, if not the next discovered in South Australia, were the next of any magnitude, and were for some years the great source of South Australian mining wealth. They have had a much wider fame than those of Kapunda. They are about ninety miles nearly due north from Adelaide, and they have the advantage of a railway for the whole distance. The one great railway of the colony runs from Adelaide to Kooringa, the name of the town close to which the Burra Burra mines are situated, with a branch to Kapunda, of which place I have already spoken. Copper therefore may be said to have made the existing railways of the colony. The copper at Burra Burra was first found by a shepherd, named Pickitt, in 1845. What became of Pickitt I never heard; but two companies were at once formed for the purchase from the government of 20,000 acres under special survey. This was the land in which the copper was known to lie, but its exact whereabouts was still a mining mystery. Of these two companies one was called the Nobs, as being specially aristocratic; the other, which was plebeian, were the Snobs. They combined, as neither could raise sufficient money alone, and the government could not or would not grant a special survey under a fixed amount which either separately was unable to pay. The land was then divided, and the two companies drew lots. The Snobs got the northern portion and all the copper, and the Nobs were driven to resell their moiety for pastoral purposes. Where the copper did lie, it lay absolutely on the surface. There was as it were a rock of copper, so that deep sinking was not necessary. During the first six years of the mine’s history 80,000 tons of ore were shipped to England, giving a profit of nearly half a million sterling. The company had begun with a capital of only £1,500 over and above the sum expended on the purchase of the land. Those were the palmy days of the Burra Burra mines, of which we used to hear much in England.