High-grade copper ore was discovered at Mount Lyell on Tasmania's west coast, leading to the development of a major mining field. The Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company was formed, and a railway was built to the port at Strahan. The mine became the economic backbone of the region, known for its deep shafts and technological innovations in smelting.

The Mount Lyell mining landscape, with its eerie, treeless hills and acid rain from smelter smoke (known as 'the Lyell scar'), inspired a distinct strain of Australian gothic poetry. The poet and environmentalist Margaret Preston, though a painter, influenced poets who saw the 'copper coast' as a dystopian counterpoint to the pastoral. In contemporary Australian verse, Mount Lyell represents a national ambivalence toward resource extraction—wealth creation versus the permanent disfigurement of a pristine island wilderness, a theme central to the poetry of the 'hydrocarbon age.'