Snowtown is a town located in the Mid North of South Australia 145 km (90 miles) north of Adelaide and lies on the main road and rail routes between Adelaide and Perth – the Augusta Highway and Adelaide-Port Augusta railway line. The town's elevation is 103 metres (338 feet) and on average the town receives 389 mm of rainfall per annum. History The settlement of Snowtown by non-Indigenous Australians initially grew up around a railway station on the Brinkworth-Wallaroo line. Located on what was traditionally the land of the Kaurna, an Aboriginal people, the first pioneers arrived sometime between 1845 and 1869 due to the rapid expansion of grazing, then farming to the north of the area. Bailliere's South Australian gazetteer and road guide, published in 1866, contains a brief description of "Hummock's Run" located north of Port Wakefield. This farmland, according to the publication, contained the farming stations of Barunga, Bumbunga and Wokurna and consisted of "salt lakes and lagoons, dense scrub, with mallee, pine and bushes, grassy plains and saltbush, well grassed spurs and hills, with oaks and wattle on the Broughton River." The hill to the east of Snowtown, Black Point Hill (and the nearby Black Point Lagoon) gave its name "Black Point" to the area by 1856 before Snowtown was established in 1878. This permanent waterhole and scrub-covered hill were then known as territory occupied by aboriginals, but claimed by Paddy Gleeson, founder of Clare as his 'Black Point Run'. From 1862, and 1863 and well before 1870 settlers and graziers campaigned for better transport routes from Black Point to Kadina for easier freight transport of wheat and wool. By 1867 a Parliamentary Enquiry produced a Report recommending the Clare to Wallaroo railway be built for a cost of £144.15s. Only with the arrival in 1870 of Robert Barr Smith at the Hummocks Run, did the surveyors immediately arrive in February 1870, and then, first a paved road (1874), and later a railway (1878) get built from Kadina to Barunga (now Barunga Gap), a location on the Western side of the Hummocks. On September 25, 1877, the Commissioner for Crown Lands agreed with a local delegation that a township should be established at Black Point, and the railway was extended from Barunga Gap to Black Point. The Government only started showing interest in the settlement as late as 1869 when it planned to establish various new