The men who chased Fisher's discovery did not lack confidence. Henry Viviain, a Hay auctioneer, arrived at Booligal with rich specimens and the claim that "the mountain is formed entirely of this ore." An early assay in Melbourne reportedly returned 60 percent copper. Speculators from Hay called for tenders to cart a thousand tons of ore 150 miles to the smelting works in Adelaide, by land and water. More finds followed: the Great Central mine three miles south, others scattered through the porphyry country. Richard Hollow, a manager with thirty years in the copper grounds of Cornwall and South Australia, took charge of the main mine. The reality proved harder than the assays promised. The first company foundered on unpaid calls - 2,000 shares forfeited by late 1878 - and in 1882 it was dissolved and reborn as the New Mount Hope Copper Mining Company.

When the new company built its smelting furnaces, Mount Hope roared to life. By 1882 the population exceeded 500 souls; a government tank was dug, a post office and bank opened, stores multiplied. A resident wrote that the blasting startled the town "eight or ten times a day," and another marvelled at the children: "it is like an ant bed, but they all seem healthy and happy." Four hotels took out licenses in 1881 alone. The town that had been a desert of rocks a few months before, one writer boasted, "may soon rival Cobar." For a brief, loud span of years it almost felt true - furnaces glowing against the night, ore carts grinding, the whole improbable enterprise humming on the strength of a green-stained hill.

Copper is a fickle master. Prices collapsed in the mid-1880s, and the "unprecedented depression in the copper market" gnawed at the company's balance sheets. There were revivals - new concentrating machinery in 1899, an acquisition by Mount Hope Ltd in 1913, 150 men employed in 1918 - but the trend ran one way. The branch railway from Matakana, built to serve the mine, opened in 1919, four months after the mine had already ceased full-time work; the trains stopped in 1924 "because of the paucity of business," and the machinery was dismantled and carted away. By 1927 Mount Hope was a "decayed mining town" that, as one observer put it, "has been living on hopes and memories for years." Over its working life the main mine yielded around 7,500 tonnes of copper - a real fortune, dug out one blast at a time, and never quite enough to last.

Mount Hope's survivor is the Royal Hotel, licensed in July 1881 to William Clark and run by the Clark family for decades. After William died in 1910, his widow Sarah held the license, then passed it to their son. The original Royal burned to the ground in December 1930 - a fire that consumed a building made "chiefly of concrete and iron with an absolute minimum of wood" in an incredibly short time, leaving the coroner with an open verdict. The pub came back, as Mount Hope things tend to, and it still trades today as the town's last business: food, beer, beds, and a claim worth stopping for - the only concrete bar in New South Wales. Around it stretch the Yathong, Nombinnie and Round Hill nature reserves, holding the largest unbroken stand of mallee left in the state, where the rare malleefowl quietly tends its mound while the old mountain keeps its copper and its silence.