Tasmania
Under Tasmania
Mineral Resources Tasmania keeps a register of every drill hole it knows of on the island, from early prospecting bores to modern diamond holes, as part of its TIGER database. The register is open for anyone to use.
That gives {holes} mineral drill holes you can see here. Nearly all were drilled by earlier explorers and miners, many of them long gone. This tour flies you through the places and stories behind them, then hands you the controls.
1870s to today
150 years of looking
Watch the holes arrive year by year, by the date each hole was drilled. A few go back to the nineteenth century. The State's own drilling picks up in the 1930s, then company exploration takes over: {d1960} holes in the 1960s, {d1970} in the 1970s and {d1980} in the 1980s.
There are {d2010} holes from the 2010s. The 2020s look quiet ({d2020} so far) because recent drilling is mostly still confidential, and another {d0} holes have no usable date, so they only show when the year filter is open.
The west coast
A mineral belt in the rainforest
Most of Tasmania's metal mines sit in a narrow belt of old volcanic rocks on the wild west coast, the Mount Read Volcanics, with tin-bearing granites nearby. Copper, zinc, lead, silver, gold and tin have all come from this strip of country between Queenstown and Waratah.
Zoom in and the holes bunch around each mine. Tasmania's register records where and how each hole was drilled, but its assays are kept in a separate database that is not part of this map.
1871
Mount Bischoff
In December 1871 James 'Philosopher' Smith found tin at Mount Bischoff, near what became Waratah. In the 1880s it was for a time the richest tin mine in the world, and it opened up the north-west of the island.
{site}
1883
Mount Lyell and Queenstown
Prospectors found gold at the Iron Blow on Mount Lyell in 1883, but the real wealth was copper. The Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company smelted it at Queenstown from the 1890s, and smelter fumes, fires and logging left the surrounding hills bare. In 1912 a fire in the North Mount Lyell mine killed 42 men.
Copper was mined here until 2014. {site}
1893
Rosebery
Tom McDonald found the Rosebery lode in 1893. The Electrolytic Zinc Company took it over in the early twentieth century, and it has been mined for zinc, lead, copper, silver and gold almost continuously since the 1930s.
Most of the holes here are Electrolytic Zinc's. {site}
Tin
Renison Bell
Tin was found at Renison Bell, near Zeehan, in 1890. Mined underground since the 1960s, Renison is one of the biggest underground tin mines in the world and Australia's main source of tin.
{site}
1882
Zeehan and Heemskirk
Silver-lead ore was found at Zeehan in 1882, and by the late 1890s it was one of the biggest towns in Tasmania, with dozens of mines. The boom faded early in the twentieth century, and explorers have since come back for tin and base metals.
{site}
1974
Que River and Hellyer
Aberfoyle found the Que River zinc-lead-silver deposit in 1974 by following up anomalies in the rainforest, then the larger Hellyer deposit nearby in 1983. Hellyer was mined from 1989 to 2000.
The holes here belong to Aberfoyle, Cominco and later explorers. {site}
1967
Savage River
Savage River is an iron ore mine in the far north-west. Since 1967 its magnetite has been ground and pumped as a slurry through a pipeline about 85 kilometres long to a pellet plant at Port Latta on the north coast.
{site}
Tungsten
King Island scheelite
At Grassy on King Island, in Bass Strait, tungsten ore (scheelite) was found early in the twentieth century and mined on and off until 1990. The Dolphin deposit has recently been brought back into production.
{site}
1877
Beaconsfield
Gold was found at Beaconsfield, on the Tamar River, in 1877, and the Tasmania mine was the island's richest gold mine until water flooded the workings and it closed in 1914. It reopened in 1999.
In April 2006 a rockfall in the mine killed Larry Knight and trapped Brant Webb and Todd Russell, who were brought out alive after 14 days. {site}
Tin and tungsten
The north-east tin fields
The granites of north-eastern Tasmania shed tin into the rivers, and from the 1870s miners, many of them Chinese, worked the alluvial tin of the Blue Tier and the rivers around it. At Aberfoyle, Storeys Creek and Rossarden tin and tungsten were mined underground until the 1980s.
{site}
Your turn
How to read this map
Each point is one hole in Mineral Resources Tasmania's register, coloured by how it was drilled. The register says where, when and how deep, and who drilled it, as reported at the time. Most holes were drilled by earlier explorers, not by whoever holds the ground today. Treat it as history, not a resource.
Use Explore to filter by drill type, slide through the years, search for a company or place, and dive into 16 places in 3D.
