Western Australia
Under Western Australia
Every mining company that explores in Western Australia has to report its results to the State. Once a report's confidential period ends it becomes open file, and the Geological Survey of Western Australia has gathered the assays from those reports into one harmonised database.
That gives {holes} drill holes you can see here, each one a point where somebody went looking for metal. This tour flies you through the places and stories behind them, then hands you the controls.
1960 to today
Sixty years of looking
Watch the holes arrive year by year, by the date of the report. Before the 1990s few results were filed in digital form, so the early decades are thin. Then the numbers climb: {d1990} holes reported in the 1990s, {d2000} in the 2000s and {d2010} in the 2010s, the decade of the mining boom.
The 2020s look quiet ({d2020} so far) only because recent drilling is mostly still confidential. Another {d0} holes have no usable report date, so they only show when the year filter is open.
Gold
The Yilgarn: a gold province
Colour the holes by gold and the old Yilgarn Craton lights up. Most of the State's drilling has chased gold: {Au} of the open-file holes were assayed for it. Each column's height is the number of holes in it, and its colour is a high but typical gold grade there (9 in 10 of its holes are below it), so one lucky hole doesn't paint a whole district.
The bright belt running north from Kalgoorlie through Leonora to Wiluna follows the greenstone belts, where most of WA's gold mines sit.
1892 to 1893
Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie and the Golden Mile
Arthur Bayley and William Ford's gold find at Coolgardie in 1892, and Paddy Hannan's near Kalgoorlie in June 1893, set off the rush to the Eastern Goldfields. The Golden Mile at Kalgoorlie became one of the richest gold fields on Earth.
Since 1989 the old underground leases have been worked as one open pit, the Fimiston Super Pit. Below the satellite image you can see the open-file holes around it, each assay coloured by gold. {site}
1966
Kambalda and the nickel boom
In January 1966 Western Mining Corporation drilled into massive nickel sulphide at Kambalda, south of Kalgoorlie. It started a nickel rush across the Goldfields. In 1969 Poseidon's find at Windarra sent its shares from under a dollar to more than $200 within months, before the bubble burst.
The same ground is also a big gold field today (St Ives), so the holes here were assayed for both. {site}
Nickel laterite
Murrin Murrin: drilling on a grid
Not all nickel sits in hard sulphide. At Murrin Murrin, deep weathering left nickel and cobalt in soft clay near the surface, and the ore is found by drilling short holes on a tight grid. It has produced nickel and cobalt since 1999.
That is why this is the most densely drilled patch in the tour. {site}
1888 to today
Greenbushes: from tin to lithium
Tin was found at Greenbushes, south of Perth, in 1888. The same pegmatite later gave tantalum, and from the 1980s the lithium mineral spodumene. Today Greenbushes is the world's biggest hard-rock lithium mine.
The steep pegmatite body shows up as a band of high lithium assays running north-south. {site}
Lithium
The lithium rush
Switch to lithium and the map changes completely. Only {Li} open-file holes were assayed for it, and they cluster in a few pegmatite fields: the Pilbara in the north, and the southern Yilgarn around Greenbushes, Mt Holland and Mt Marion.
Pilgangoora, Wodgina and Mt Holland (Earl Grey, found by Kidman Resources in 2016) all grew out of this kind of drilling.
Pilbara
Pilgangoora
Pilbara Minerals began producing spodumene at Pilgangoora in 2018, in an old tantalum field. The assays below are coloured by lithium; switch to tantalum to see the older story of the same rocks. {site}
1971
Telfer and the Paterson
Newmont found gold at Telfer, on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, in 1971, and it has been mined since 1977. The Paterson province around it also holds Nifty copper and the newer Havieron find.
Havieron, discovered in 2018, barely appears here: its holes are still confidential, a reminder that open-file data runs years behind the drill rigs. {site}
2012
Nova: a discovery under the sand
In 2012 a small explorer, Sirius Resources, hit nickel-copper sulphide at Nova in the Fraser Range, under thin cover with almost nothing showing at surface. IGO bought Sirius in 2015 and built the Nova-Bollinger mine.
Most of the holes here were drilled after the discovery, to outline the ore body. {site}
2005
Gold in the desert: Tropicana
AngloGold Ashanti and Independence Group found Tropicana on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert in 2005, and the mine opened in 2013. Gold Road's Gruyere, found in 2013 to the north-west, followed the same idea: new gold under the sand, far from the old fields. {site}
Rare earths
Mt Weld
Mt Weld, near Laverton, is a carbonatite: an unusual volcanic plug where weathering concentrated rare earth elements in the soil above it. Lynas Rare Earths mines it. The assays below are coloured by cerium, the commonest rare earth. {site}
Your turn
How to read this map
Each point is one open-file hole, coloured by the best assay in that hole for the element you pick. The assays are as companies reported them, with no quality checks, and most holes were drilled by earlier owners, not today's. Treat it as history, not a resource.
Use Explore to pick an element, set a minimum grade, slide through the years, search for a company or place, and dive into 20 deposits in 3D.
