John Campbell Miles

John Campbell Miles (5 May 1883, Richmond, Melbourne—4 December 1965, Ringwood, Victoria) was an Australian prospector and pastoral worker who discovered the mineralisation upon which the Mount Isa Mines were established in Queensland.

John Campbell Miles was born on 5 May 1883 in Richmond, Melbourne to Thomas Miles and Fanny Louisa Miles (née Chancellor). He was the eighth of nine children. He was a wanderer and an adventurer from the time he ran away from school to work with a bootmaker. Blainey listed his quick progression of jobs as ploughman, miner, carter, railway navvy, wild-pig hunter and windmill repairer.

At the age of twenty-four (1907) he took a job as underground worker at Broken Hill, but stayed only until the following April before riding his bicycle 1,500 miles to the newly discovered Oaks goldfield (later known as Kidston) in north Queensland. Miles would return to labouring work on the railways within a few months.

From the Oaks, Miles worked as farm labourer in the Wimmera, then returned to Queensland where he spent ten years drifting from station to station, probably supplementing his wages by fossicking. After a brief visit to Melbourne in 1921, he decided to follow up the reminiscences of an elderly boundary rider who claimed to have seen gold on the Murranji Track, a cattle trail in the Northern Territory.

He travelled slowly with his six horses, camping near to Hughenden and Richmond and visiting the ghost town of Mount Elliott on the Cloncurry copper field. Between Duchess and Camooweal he first met William Simpson of the Native Bee mine, who later became his partner. By this time it was February 1923 and he had been traveling for over a year. Knowing that he was in copper country he would often take his hammer and do some prospecting. One day while searching amongst a small range of ridges he broke open a yellow-brown rock and found that the inside was black and honeycombed and the rock was surprisingly heavy. Breaking more rocks found more black and grey mineralisation over a large area. He was not aware that the mineral he was exposing was cerussite, a lead carbonate, but some of the pieces contained galena, which he recognised from his time at Broken Hill.

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