PIONEERS’ COUNTRY - The Story of the Pioneering of the Beautiful Country over the Range Inland from Cairns North Queensland. Glenville Pike 1976, Cosmos Printing Press Ltd. Hong Kong. ISBN 9598960 7 4
Page 220.
The discovery of copper at Mount Garnet actually predates Chillagoe by five or six years, but it was John Moffat and his Irvinebank Mining Company which brought it about.
The actual discoverer was Albert Vollenwider, a Swiss, who came to Queensland in 1871. He landed in Cardwell from the steamer Tinonee and carried his swag over the range to Georgetown and mined for gold with varying success. He went to the Palmer in 1875 and joined in the rush to the Hodgkinson the following year.
He arrived in Herberton in 1881 and in September 1882, prospecting far to the south-west, he discovered copper at Mt. Garnet. Like similar finds in out-of-the-way places it was then of no value, but Vollenwider had unbounded faith in it and refused to part with his lease. Mt. Garnet’s mushroom-like boom began in 1896.
Note: The Far Northern mining field was situated on the Atherton Tablelands, inland from Cairns, North Queensland.The late A.F.Waddell, Irvenbank’s historian, remembered Vollenwider as a big bearded man wearing a long coat with a wide belt, a broad-brimmed hat, and always carrying awhip - like a picture of a Boer farmer in South Africa at the time.