Paul Morris: The long road to Yagga Yagga - a new relationship with Aboriginal traditional owners

Paul Morris talks about of his last regolith sampling programs, which was in fact requested by the traditional owners of that country 

Transcript

00:01 Paul

These traditional owners they had the helicopter for the heritage work. One guy had a look at an area where he was born. I reckon he would’ve been in his 70s. He’d never been there since he was a boy. When he came back, he had tears in his eyes.

00:12 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 of his last regolith sampling programs, which was in fact requested by the traditional owners of that country.

00:47 Paul

One of the last programs that we that we did, came about in a rather strange why. North of Kiwikurra, is a tract of country there, which is really heavy desert country. Geologically it's not very interesting at all. It's largely Canning Basin sediments, which are Palaeozoic and, as far as mineralization is concerned, not particularly interesting. But the people who come from that country, Parna Ngururrpa, used to live at a community called Yagga Yagga, which is halfway between Kiwikurra and Balgo, which is southwest of Halls Creek. Yagga Yagga’s about 180, 200 kilometers south of Balgo. A large number of them live in Balgo and they were really desperate to get back onto their country.

We were approached by an organization in Perth, Central Desert Native Title Services, who represent Parna Ngururrpa. And I got a phone call out in the blue saying that Parna Ngururrpa wanted us to carry out a gravity and a regolith sampling program on their country. And I must confess, I smiled because of all these years where we had been desperately trying to get access to country with Aboriginal people and had frustration after frustration, here was a group who had actually come to us and asked us to do it. And the reason they gave was they'd seen the benefits that come out of the program at Kiwikurra,

02:00 Julie

Right.

02:00 Paul

from the mob to the south. And the Kiwikurra mob had all these companies come in, and evidently they'd upgraded their medical facilities. They'd upgraded the school. Their young blokes had got work working on drilling rigs. They controlled where the camps were. They control the conduct of the camps. So they were making a reasonable amount of money out of this and the community was surviving, and it was flourishing.

02:25 Julie

Yeah.

02:26 Paul

So they wanted to get some interest shown, to get some money so they could get back onto their country,

02:31 Julie

Yep.

02:31 Paul

go back to Yagga Yagga.

So, I looked at this area, and I spoke to Ian Tyler, who was the deputy director, and I said, “Ian, this is not an area that I would particularly choose to go to”, I said, “but we really have got to do this, because it's a great opportunity to show that we have faith in Aboriginal people and they can have some faith in us as well.” I said, “I reckon we could probably collect about six or 700 samples there with the amount of money we've got available. And the worst case scenario is I get 700 samples, which have actually absolutely no mineralization in them at all”.

A similar sort of program was set up, which was, there would be a gravity program done first, and then a selection of those gravity sites would be revisited to do regolith sampling.

03:13 Julie

Yep.

03:14 Paul

But first of all, the heritage work had to be dealt with. So what we decided to do was to run a heritage program up there before the gravity sampling. And I said I'd run that. The deal was that two of us, that was me in a field assistant, would go to Yagga Yagga, this abandoned community, and we would meet there, which is in the centre of the area, and a helicopter would come out from Alice Springs, and the traditional owners would have the helicopter for between two and three days to go and have a look around and decide which of the sites they were not happy with us visiting. I was also keen to find out what Yagga Yagga was like as a potential base for the sampling. And a big attraction of it was that there was water there.

03:58 Julie

Right.

03:58   Paul

The traditional owners had actually, with the help of the Water Corporation, had put down a ball and had some and had a pump their solar powered pump with a tank next to it so there was fresh water there. And that was a really big thing for remote campus to have a good supply of water.

04:11 Julie

Okay.

04:11 Paul

So if we were to go there, we would have to take everything with us generators, showers, food, everything we'd have to take up with us to do the sampling. But any case we had to do the the heritage work first. So we agreed to meet the traditional owners there who were coming down from Balgo.

So, I was looking for a field assistant. And I got in touch with our Carlisle base and they said, “Oh, field assistants.” This was sort of about October, in in 2014. What were we going to do is for a field assistant? And they saw this bloke up in Kalgoorlie, who's really keen to go out and he said four wheel drive experience. So to cut a long story short, he came down here to Perth, and we flew up to the Kimberley, up to Broome. So we picked up vehicles that were in a store there. We got some supplies and we drove over to Halls Creek, through Fitzroy Crossing to Halls Creek, and then we went south through Balgo and we drove down to Yagga Yagga. Now, the road to Balgo is pretty rough. But the road from Balgo to Yagga Yagga, is just a track. Like it's a sandy track, which has got wash outs in it. It  actually goes all the way through to Kiwikurra.

05:16 Julie

Yeah.

05:16 Paul

But it's a real goat track. It's pretty bad. I was a little worried about this field assistant. He was very, very confident, overly confident young man in his early 20s. Had a couple of experiences with him, which made me a little bit wary. Road trains are a constant around Western Australia, and we were behind one. And we had a UHF radio in the vehicle, and he got on the UHF radio. And he said, “Hey long load in front, anyone coming?” And this voice said “No, there's no one there”. So he took off to pass this truck. And there was no vision really, there was a brow of a hill coming up.

05:53 Julie

Oh God.

05:54 Paul

And he got through okay, and there was no one coming. But I said to him, “Do you reckon it was that truck in front that you were talking to?” He said, “Oh yeah”, I said, “How do you know? It could have been the one behind us”.

06:05 Julie

Oh my God.

06:05 Paul

He said, “Oh no”, and I said “Don't do that again”. “Don't do that, again”. I've had great field assistants, I've had a wonderful field assistants, you know, people I trust my life with and have got me out of some very, very tricky situations. Some very committed people, hugely knowledgeable people. But I got the idea this guy was probably not one of them. So in any case, I was a bit worried about this.

We got down to Yagga Yagga, the helicopter was not due for a day or so. Some fuel that arrived down there. We set up on the veranda of the Rugby Club, they had an AFL club sports ground with an abandoned clubroom. And they had a shop there, which had been trashed, and but there was a big delivery area out the back. And I thought that'd be pretty good. When we had the program come up here, there was lots of places.

06:46 Julie

Right.

06:47 Paul

The helicopter arrived. And, and in the later that next morning, these traditional owners all arrived. There was about eight of them arrived some, some old ladies, a couple of old blokes and a couple of young blokes and an anthropologist and person from the organization, the Central Desert organization. They had the helicopter. And I really said to them, “Look, here's the map, go where you want to go.” One guy went out and had a look at an area where he was born, which was about 80 kilometres east of Yagga Yagga. He was, I reckon he would’ve been in his 70s. He'd never been there since he was a boy. He said he could remember when he was out there with his dad. And when he came back, you know, he had tears in his eyes.

07:20 Julie

Right.

07:21 Paul

And after they'd finished, there were a few areas they weren't happy about. Some of the hills have special meaning. And they said don't go on these. Gravity on hills is no good at all, usually, because the height correction is difficult to make. So the gravity was not a problem. I wasn't interested going on hills, because there's not a lot of regolith on hills in any case, so there's a few hills around, so that was fine.

So they set off back to Balgo. And the next day the helicopter was going to go back to Alice Springs, and we were going to head off back to Perth. We were going to drive all the way back to Perth.

Late that afternoon, the helicopter pilot’s getting his bit of stuff together and I had a chat to him and the field assistant said to me, we'd had dinner and he said, “Oh, I might just go up to the tank and have a bit of a wash”. I said, “that's fine”. I said, “When you come back,” I said, “I want you to put the battery on one”. Now, all the geological survey vehicles have got a switch in them, Cole Hursey switch. They run on two batteries. Critical is that you don't flatten both batteries. If you flatten both batteries, you can’t start the vehicle. And if you can’t start the vehicle, then you've got a real problem.

08:22 Julie

Yeah.

08:23 Paul

So the best thing to do is to have one viable battery. And if the other battery happens to go flat, overnight, it doesn't matter. You know, like if your fridge, as long as your fridge is closed or whatever, your food's not going to go off. So that's fine. I said to him, “When you come back, switch the battery, make sure it's on one”. He said, “Yeah, one, okay, fine.”

So, I was getting ready for bed, pretty early on in the night, probably about eight o'clock or so. And I, I heard the vehicle come back. And I thought I might just get up and check the battery. And I thought, Oh no. I should have checked the battery. Because when I get up in the morning, he hadn’t switched it over.

08:58 Julie

Oh no.

08:58 Paul

And I turned the engine over and of course I couldn't bloody ignite the coil at all. So the batteries were flat. And I said to him, “You didn't switch the battery over”. He said, “Oh, yeah I did”. I said, “No, you didn't”. I said, “here it is here”. I said “No, you didn't,” I said, “the batteries are flat.” I said, “how are we? How do you think we're gonna get back?” “Oh”, he said, “I’ll go and see the helicopter pilot and borrow the battery out the helicopter.” I said, “Good luck with that”. I said, “Good luck with that. I said if you touch the helicopter, I said he'll bloody, he’ll break your arm”. I said, “he's not going to give you anything off the helicopter”. I thought I'm going to have to phone up Carlisle, this is Perth, Perth base, and they're going to have to bring me a battery in from Halls Creek.

09:38 Julie

Oh God.

09:39 Paul

You know, which is a long way away. So I had a bit of a chat and I said to the helicopter pilot, “When are you going back?” He said, “Oh, pretty soon.” I said, “How about we fly to Balgo and pick up a battery?” He said, “Yeah, that’s fine”. So he and I got in the helicopter. And I said to the field assistant, “Stay here. Don't touch anything. Don't touch anything. Okay?” I said, “We’ll be back soon.”  So we're flying like, in the helicopter, it's what 20 minutes to Balgo, 25 minutes to Balgo. So we're flying up there, the helicopter pilot I think he thought this is a bit like climbing in the car and going down to get the Sunday paper when you're in Alice Springs, you know, nothing unusual at all. You know we climb in the helicopter, no doors on or anything like, he didn’t put the doors on yet, fly up we land out the back of the shop in the middle of Balgo. He turns the helicopter off, we get out, go into the shop. There is one four-wheel drive battery left. So we buy that. It cost me 380 bucks for the battery. We had an ice cream each. He said, “Don't eat the ice cream in the helicopter”. So we sat there quietly and finished the ice creams. And then we flew back to Yagga Yagga, put the battery in the car, started it and we were away. So we got it going. And we were fine. So I worked out that I think the battery all up cost us about 1200 bucks, you know with the helicopter time and buying the battery, you know, would’ve cost us that much but we got out of a hole there.

10:58 Julie

Yeah.

10:59 Paul

And so I was pleased when we got back to Perth without any further misadventure. We got the heritage work done. So we set off very shortly after that. A group of us drove up from Perth. Mobs of us drive up from Perth. We had three field assistants. Heidi Allen and Peter Haines came up to do the bedrock geology. I was up there with Nadir de Souza Kovacs for the sampling. We had Josh Guilliamese, who's a geologist, came up. He volunteered to come on the program. He wanted to come and have a bit of a look around. So we had Andrea Scheib was up there. So we switched around. Sometimes I was a field assistant, sometimes I was a geologist. And we went out and collected samples.

The same thing, huge amounts of sand plain, long sand dunes, collections in swales. Not a lot of outcrop, salt lakes, which we avoided, difficult to do the chemistry in salt lakes. So we collected a number of samples. We had fuel relayed around. One of the conditions there is that we wouldn't go off the tracks, the Aboriginal people, we wouldn't go off the tracks. So we were pretty limited where we could put the fuel. Heidi and Peter were pretty keen to go out and look at rocks in the southeast of the area towards Kiwikurra, well northeast of Kiwikurra. And we took them out there, dropped them off. And they did some traverses in pretty hostile country there. And it turned out the geology that they did out there was some major revisions of the stratigraphy and was quite a benefit to some of the work that related with the regolith.

So they went out there and were quite excited with the work they were doing. And I was talking to Peter at night. And he said, “I just want to give a bit of a talk about that”. And he said to me, “Have you got a whiteboard?” And I said, “No, I haven’t  got a whiteboard”. So we got an old fridge door out of the shop, which was hanging off there. We lifted it off. And he did this discussion of the geology using pens and the fridge door as a whiteboard, sat with it on his knee.

12:44 Julie

Nice.

12:44 Paul

And he talked about the revisions of the stratigraphy, which turned out to be geologically really quite interesting. 

Same sort of thing, getting up at quarter five in the morning, finishing usually about four o'clock in the afternoon. We collected all these samples, and at the end of the program, we packed them all up and the company that would come down and collect all the fuel drums, the empty fuel drums, would also take all the samples back and freight them down to Perth for us.

Before we set off back to Perth, we did something which I'd been wanting to do for quite a while. Running through the middle of the Ngururrpa area is a fault, the Stansmore Fault. And it's a basin-bounding structure. Within the Canning Basin there are a series of sub basins and this fault bounds these two sub basins. And the fault is of the same order as ones that control sedimentary exhalative lead-zinc mineralization up on the north.

13:36 Julie

Right.

13:36 Paul

on around the Devonian Reef complexes. So these are economic deposits like at Admiral Bay and places like that, economic SEDEX deposits. So these are faults that the control at the same order.

13:47 Julie

Yep.

13:48 Paul

And I was curious to see whether there was any kind of mineralization coming up this fault. Now this is the mineral systems approach, you know, where you've got several components that contribute to what a mineral deposit is.

13:58 Julie

Yeah.

13:58 Paul

And one of them is a focusing mechanism, which is a fault. So we decided that we've run a couple of transects. We did regolith sampling at close spacing across one part of the fault. We also collected some vegetation. Now spinifex is, is widely spread up there. It's a native grass, which grows in arid conditions. And it looks lovely. It looks like this lovely soft green grass. I've actually seen a tourist say, “Oh wonderful” and throw themselves into spinifex

14:28 Julie

Oh God.

14:28 Paul

and then spend the next five days trying to pull these silica hardened spines, which are like little fine needles, out of their skin. It's horrific stuff.

14:37 Julie

Yeah.

14:38 Paul

But it's all over the place up there. And CSIRO had done some work on using spinifex as a sample media, in the Tanami area, northeast of where we were working and there's gold mineralization up there. So we'd sampled done regolith sampling on the edge of that, in the northeastern part of the Ngururrpa area. But I was keen to see whether we could pick up something over this fault using spinifex and some of this fine fraction regolith chemistry.

Going back to the work we'd done in the east Wongatha area, if there was a fluid that was coming up through this quartz sand, perhaps remnants of it were in the clay or in the fine fraction. So we took the samples and went back to Perth. I didn't know anything about collecting spinifex, but I had a pair of electric garden shears which are absolutely wonderful things. You could go around and give these spinifex bushes big haircuts and put all this stuff in calico bags and took it all back to Perth and dried it there. And my good friend Colin Dunn, who's also in the Association of Applied Geochemists, probably one of the best known biogeochemists in the world, a hugely well credentialed guy, sent me some advice, gave me some standards to run with it. We got the work done in Canada, in a lab in Canada. It’s now done in Western Australia, but a lab in Vancouver used to do that. I sent the samples over there. They were quarantined, and then tested and you ash the sample, you actually create an ash out of the sample,

15:55 Julie

Okay.

15:56 Paul

which gets rid of all of the organic components. And then you analyze the ash. So we got those results. But I thought a small program, like I think about 20 samples on each transect, I thought if nothing comes with nothing comes of it. So we got the results back from the whole program. And there was some interesting sorts of things came out. Up in the northeastern area, close to this Tanami gold mineralization, we got some anomalous gold results up there in the regolith.

16:21 Julie

Okay.

16:21 Paul

So I was quite pleased about that. I was quite buoyed by that. I thought it was going to be deadly dull. In the southeast of the area where Heidi and Peter had been we got some slightly higher zinc results down there, which was a bit unusual. But the rest of the area didn't look particularly interesting. Then we got the results of these transects back. We got the regolith back first. And I got some amazing hits over the fault trace. We had a sample right on the fault trace. And we got some incredibly high zinc concentrations, lanthanum, cerium.

16:53 Julie

Wow.

16:54 Paul

All of these lithophile elements there. Things like chrome, hafnium, tantalum, zirconium, niobium, no good at all, not fluid mobile. All the fluid mobile elements, the ones with the low charges on them and the big ionic radii like potassium and things like that. All the fluid mobile elements were, were elevated in this sample over the fault trace.

The other area we’d done with the spinifex. The faulting there is a bit more complex. There's probably two faults up there. It's a bit of a fault zone.

17:19 Julie

Right.

17:20 Paul

We got some high zinc values up there too in the regolith and in the spinifex. But in the spinifex, we got some incredibly high boron concentrations, which is hugely fluid mobile as well. And also some other low field strength, some of these low charge big ionic radius ions. So I think there was some good stories coming out of this. There is a fluid coming up the fault. And it had no gold in it, but it did have a lot of trace elements like thalium in it, which is an indicator of SEDEX-style mineralization. it had high zinc in it. So we thought, possibly some kind of buried mineralization, some concealed lead-zinc mineralization here.

The revisions that Pete and Heidi had done to the stratigraphy in the southeast, suggested that the rocks there were possibly correlative with some of the Mt Isa rocks, which hosted SEDEX-style mineralization. So not surprising perhaps that we had got a little bit of zinc in the regolith. And these rocks were possibly underneath the rocks, which were both cut by the Stansmore Fault. So there may have been something feeding the rocks there. Also, there’s some petroleum holes there, which had encountered rocks of the same age with minor zinc concentrations as at Admiral Bay. So there was a little bit of indication of some mineralization there.

So the test, of course, is what happens when you put the data out, you know, is anything going to happen? So nothing happened for a while.

18:45 Julie

Right.

18:46 Paul

And then I got a phone call. And there was four geologists from Newmont wanted to come in to see me. So we had a meeting with them in Mineral House, and they said they just wanted to talk to me about the regolith geochemistry programs that I'd been involved with over the last few years. And I talked a little bit about Kiwikurra, and about some of the Kimberley work. And I said the last one we did was on this Ngururrpa country. And they said, “Oh we know about that, really quite interesting”. And the guy pulled a map out and he said, “We’ve just pegged this ground”, and they’d pegged the area up to the northeast, which had the anomalous gold concentrations on it.

19:19 Julie

Right.

19:20 Paul

They said, “we're really interested in this area. Seeing this gave us a bit of confidence into going into this area.”  I think Parna Ngururrpa would have got some money out of that. I know that the access road down to Yagga Yagga was improved because they had to bring equipment into explore.

I checked a couple of months later and someone had pegged the Stansmore Fault area as well. 

19:40 Julie

Fantastic.

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