Sustained recent attempts to locate economic Moonta - style copper mineralisation in Proterozoic basement in the vicinity of Bute township have been based on the presence there of a large regional aeromagnetic high, and on a past drilling discovery by North Broken Hill Ltd of trace disseminated copper sulphides over a wide interval in weakly altered, ?fault-brecciated siliceous dolomitic metasediments in their 1980 diamond drillhole B23. A number of geophysical methods were therefore lately tried as a means of defining robust drilling targets in a known range of local bedrock metasediments including carbonates, meta-pelites, meta-arenites, graphitic shales, acid volcanics and basic lavas, that are buried under approximately 100+ m thickness of Adelaidean, Cambrian and younger cover sediments, but unfortunately all new efforts yielded ambiguous and ultimately disappointing results. Specific works to test the basement prospectivity have included acquiring grid-based detailed ground magnetic, gravity and Sirotem traverses in three subtly anomalous areas, prior to the RC drilling of 9 holes totalling 1521 m (the last three of which, completed in 2005, were partially funded under PIRSA's PACE Initiative). Despite these holes demonstrating that widespread traces of copper mineralisation are present in the basement rocks at Bute, no significant mineralisation was detected in any of them, although several holes did encounter a strongly pyritic Woocalla Dolomite beneath the Tapley Hill Formation shale section of the cover sequence, a feature which is thought to be possibly analogous to the host bed setting for the Kapunda and Mount Gunson stratiform deposits. The ultimate source of the regional geophysical basement anomalism in the Bute area is now concluded to be lying at depths of perhaps 1000-1500 m.