Paul Morris: Building relationships with Aboriginal traditional owners through survey work

Paul Morris talks about a remote regolith sampling program based out of Kiwikurra, near the Northern Territory border, that helped build new relationships with Aboriginal traditional owners 

Transcript

00:01 Paul

One of the directors at the survey said to me, “You'd better not bloody come back with 1000 samples with 95% silica in them.”

00:07 Julie

Welcome to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. In this series, five geologists talk about their years devoted to working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia. From understanding early life, to the tectonic processes that shaped our planet, and making the maps that unearth our understanding of Western Australia’s geology, they reveal their shared passion for discovering the stories in the rocks beneath our feet.

I’m Julie Hollis.

In this episode Paul Morris, talks about a remote regolith sampling program based out of Kiwikurra, near the Northern Territory border, that helped build new relationships with Aboriginal traditional owners.

00:45 Paul

There was a major problem with some of the regional work we'd been doing. Some of the sheets we've done for the regional regular geochemistry program, one of them in particular sticks, in my mind, it was the Agina sheet which is on the western side of the Yilgarn which takes in the coastal strip around Calbarrie and just north of Geraldton. Large amounts of quartz sand on it. And we were analyzing it using the traditional regolith geochemistry approach from the program that Richard set up, which was the sand fraction, and we were doing what's called an aggressive total digest. So what you get at the end of the day, is you get a sample which has got 95% silica.

01:21 Julie

Right.

01:21 Paul

And it's useless. And if you move out off the Yilgarn Craton and you move over towards the edge of the Yilgarn you're looking at trying to find new greenstone belts under cover. These are areas which have got an inordinate amount of this windblown quartz sand. One of the directors at the survey said to me, “You'd better not bloody come back with 1000 samples with 95% silica in them, you know having cost me several thousand dollars to do that”. So we really had to come up with some way to get around this.

And this is where we had to do a little bit of thinking. Then we had the offer of doing a program in the Arunta area right on the WA-Northern Territory border.

In late 2006, Mike Donaldson, who was the that time the Deputy Director for the geological survey, met up with some other geologists at a remote Aboriginal community at Kiwikurra, which is around about 700 kilometers west of Alice Springs, in Western Australia, just inside the WA-Northern Territory border. It's a pretty it's obviously a very remote area. Not a great deal is known about the geology of the area. But there had been a bit of interest on and off because Geoscience Australia had done some reconnaissance work there a number of years ago, which included a small amount of geochemistry and chronology on some granitic rocks there. And they had argued at that stage that the area had potential for iron oxide, copper gold mineralization.

This created quite a bit of interest in the area. But attempts at mineral exploration they had proved pretty unsuccessful because the traditional owners of the area were really quite resistant to having any kind of mineral exploration there, any exploration companies in there. And a number of companies had taken up tenements and found that they couldn't get on the tenement to do any work. And they'd relinquished it, the word got around that it wasn't a very favorable area for doing mineral exploration.

So Mike Donaldson and these and these other explorers are up there talked to the Aboriginal people. And they came away with an understanding that they would allow the geological survey to do a gravity program up there. And we tacked on the end of that, in that there was a heritage clearance to be done for the gravity program, about the sites where the helicopter would land. And some sites were were excluded from the program program on cultural grounds. But we use those sites, a selection of those sites to do some regolith sampling.

So this procedure is one that carried on from there, which is to collect gravity from a number of sites that have been cleared and then to follow up with regolith sampling at the same sites, so avoiding a second heritage clearance.

03:58 Julie

Yep.

03:59 Paul

So this happened. The heritage clearance was done. And with the traditional loaders, some sites were excluded. A company came in and carried out the gravity survey. The gravity was much more detailed. It was on a two and a half by two and a half kilometre grid. It was based at Kiwikurra, at the community there. After the company had left, we arrived there to do the regolith work.

Getting there is a real problem. It's quite a remote area to get to. And we also decided we were going to adopt a little bit of a new sampling approach. So rather than having a helicopter moving different crews around we had one helicopter. And we had one sampling team that stayed with the helicopter all the time, a geologist and a field assistant. And the helicopter would wait while the sample was taken. And then we'd all climb would climb back on the helicopter and fly to the next site.

So there's a relatively small party, Heidi Allen, who still works for the geological survey and myself, were involved with the sampling. We had Ian Tyler and Catherine Spaggiari drove up from Perth up to the area and they were going to look at some of the bedrock geology up there. We had a field assistant who used to work for the survey, was in Alice Springs. He came out and did all the logistical work for us moving fuel around. So Heidi and I flew to Alice Springs.

05:14 Julie

Yep.

05:15 Paul

We met up with the field assistant, we picked up some vehicles that had been left by the survey there from the Musgrave field work that Hugh Smithies was doing

05:23 Julie

Yep.

05:24 Paul

and we drive the 700 kilometers west to Alice Springs.

Kiwikurra’s a pretty well set up community. It's a dry community. There is some quite good infrastructure there. There's a school, there’s a medical place as a shop. A few hundred people there not very many, probably a couple of hundred, 150 people there. We had a house to stay in. So this was really luxurious for us, a three bedroom house. It was just amazing. So none of this sort of putting up tents or dragging caravans around or anything like that.

05:50 Julie

Luxury.

05:51 Paul

It was It was great. And it was on the periphery of the community. So the helicopter could really land outside the back door.

The area is is really dominated by regolith, a huge amount of regolith. There are some rocks outcropping there, but large amounts of of windblown sand, which bears no genetic relationship to the bedrock at all. And this problem came up again. What are we going to sample and how are we going to analyze it?

So we changed things a little bit here. It was just a selection of sites that we took for the regolith. We didn't do all of the sites that were covered by gravity. We just picked up areas just to get a representation. We finished up getting 550 samples in the area over a two week period, three week period. And we decided that we would collect at these site's about three or four kilograms. And instead of doing a total digest of the sample – that is to try and find out the complete chemistry of the sample – we did what's called a partial digest. And this is where you use, we use aqua regia, which is a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid, and it's an acid combination that will not attack silicates, so it won't dissolve quartz or anything like that. And so you avoid this dilution effect of barren quartz sand.

07:03 Julie

Right.

07:03 Paul

And the idea was that anything interesting that was in the sample, any sulfides or anything that would go into solution and could be analyzed. It's also very good for stripping things off clay minerals, so it may not dissolve the clay, but it will strip off any elements that are stuck to the clay.

07:20 Julie

Okay.

07:20 Paul

And a clay and the fine fraction of regolith is really quite interesting part of these quartz-rich samples. It’s chemically the most active. It might only be a few percent, often 3 or 4%. But it's chemically the most active part of the of the of the sample. And this became almost a premise for later programs we did in some of these areas.

So we arrived up in Kiwikurra. We set up at the house there and the helicopter arrived, all the heritage work had been done. But we still had meetings with two traditional owners there, two senior lawman from the area, who were very keen to find out what we wanted to do.

07:55 Julie

Right.

07:55 Paul

And we started the program where first thing in the morning, we take the regional mappers. So this was Ian and Catherine who were going to look at the bedrock. They'd be taken out to an area with the helicopter, often with a traditional owner, and would they'd be taken out and dropped off at one point. And they'd walk around all day, the helicopter would come back, pick up Heidi and myself. We'd race off to predetermined sites. We had a sampling map, one for the pilot one for us. And we'd follow on this sampling map going along these tracks and landing at different sites.

08:27 Julie

Yep.

08:28 Paul

The helicopter would wait with the engine on. We'd move outside of the rotors. We'd dig a hole, take a sample, put it in a bag, make some notes about the location of the sample, the type of regolith, any bedrock nearby, any minerals we could identify, geomorphological features. And then when that was done, we’d climbed back in the helicopter. It was taking us about five to 10 minutes to collect a sample.

08:51 Julie

Yep.

08:51 Paul

As you can imagine, it's pretty noisy. There's a fair bit of dust blowing around. But you can't shut the helicopter down because if you shut it down, you have to wait while it cools down. And then you have to fire it up again and wait builds up some, as the engine warms up again. So we had a maximum amount of time we could have stayed was 20 minutes at each site. Otherwise, you'd have to close down the helicopter.

09:10 Julie

Yep.

09:10 Paul

So in the end of the program, we collected more than 550 samples. Ian and Catherine got a whole lot of rocks for geochronology. We hadn't seen anything that really sparked a huge amount of interest. But some of the rock samples that were collected with the first opportunity to date some of the rocks in really remote areas. The regolith samples clearly were a big a big boost for the exploration.

As it turned out, from then onwards, exploration really took off in the area. The data were released. The Aboriginal people took control of exploration in the Kiwikurra area. And if you look on the on the map on any tenement map around there now you'll see there's exploration for all sorts of commodities gold and Pollock hills. There’s SEDEX-hosted mineralization, there’s even, there's a diamond field, the Webb diamond field that's been discovered up there. And it's been looked out for about 10 or 12 years. So I think that it really helped break down this barrier that we weren't out there to exploit these people. And they said that we were really quite welcome to come back.

10:11 Julie

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