dispersed, they were able to live cheaply, to carry on their business with little hired labour, and to look forward with confidence to annual income from the clip of wool, and annual increase of wealth by the natural increase of their flocks.
Thus, in 1843, South Australia, formed with so much preparation, the subject of so much printing, colonised by a superior class, forced forward by an enormous expenditure of public and private capital, instead of presenting a picture of a contented population, divided into capitalists and labourers engaged in scientific agriculture, owed all its exports to dispersion after the manner of neighbouring colonies, whose "barbarous manners" had been so much contemned, and presented a picture of cottier farmers, vegetating in obscurity, content to live with few comforts, without rent or taxes. Some squatted on land the property of absentees, many more as tenants not paying any rent, whom the landlords were glad to retain in order to keep their land in condition. The tenants of the South Australian Company were in this state.
Looking back at the condition of South Australia after it had ceased to attract the importation of capital, there can be no doubt that if it had been as far from the old ports of the colonies as Swan River, and out of reach of the expeditions of overlanders, it would have sunk even to a lower ebb than Western Australia.
When land-jobbing had been exhausted, and all the schemes hatched in England for employing capital had been tried and found wanting, an accident revealed to the colonists the existence of a treasure which even the sanguine and poetical promoters of the colony had never suspected or suggested. They had placed coals, marble, slate, and precious stones among the probable exports; but copper and lead had not entered into their calculations.
In 1841 a little lead ore was discovered and sent to England. In 1843 Mr. Button, the brother of a gentleman of some means, but who had himself been compelled by the general depression to accept the situation of sheep overseer, accidentally discovered, and, in partnership with Captain Bagot, became the purchaser of, the eighty-acre section which included the Kapunda mine. Other mines were subsequently discovered, to which, wherever of any importance, a description will be given in the chapter devoted to the present resources of the colony; but the great event, the turning-point of the fortunes of South Australia, was the discovery of the Burra Burra mine, which has alone furnished for the last five years more than four-fifths of South Australian exports.
