The Environmental Protection Authority has assessed a proposal to explore for minerals, under exploration licence 70/647, an area north of Eneabba and east of Arrowsmith. The application impinges on a proposed nature reserve, Red Book Recommendation 5.7.

An exploration licence (described in Part IV, Sections 57- 70 of the Mining Act, 1978) allows the licensee to explore for all minerals in or under the land. The granting of the licence by the Minister for Mines provides the holder of the licence with security of tenure for five years and the right to enter the licence area to conduct exploration activity according to conditions placed on the licence. The licence area must be halved at the end of the third and fourth years and there are obligatory expenditure commitments.

On grant of licence, the Department of Mines has regulatory power via the licence conditions and requires a security or a bond to ensure that rehabilitation is completed to an acceptable standard. Many of the licence conditions relate to environmental protection issues and the Department of Mines has undertaken with the Environmental Protection Authority to apply a standard set of conditions on tenements, such as this one, which cover environmentally sensitive areas.

Consultations with the proponents, mining industry representatives, conservation group representatives and the Departments of Mines and Conservation and Land Management identified a number of issues concerning mineral tenement applications in general. These included the legality of conditions, a preference for not granting tenements over sensitive areas, the need to ensure that consistent standards of management are applied to all users of sensitive areas and means for supervising and auditing non ground-disturbing activity. The issues were taken into account in the course of this assessment and in further developing the conditions.

Bulletin 266 consists of 15 chapters published in six separate volumes. (The report is reproduced below in seven separate parts.)

Chapters 1 - 4 (bound with the appendices) contain information general to wetlands. They form essential background to the subsequent chapters which describe most of the clearly definable seasonal and permanent lakes with open water.

The Bulletin is not an exhaustive inventory of all wetland types. Readers are referred to C. A. Semeniuk (1987), Wetlands of the Darling System - A geomorphic approach to habitat classification. Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia. Volume 69, Part 3. pp 95-112 for a comprehensive classification of wetland types on the Swan Coastal Plain.

The index map on page (iv) shows how the wetland chains have been grouped into chapters. The position in the text where individual wetlands are discussed is shown in the index on page 418 (Chapters 1 - 4).

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Chapters 1-4 and the Appendices to all 15 chapters (pdf 1.77 Mb)

Chapters 5-6 (pdf 1.32 Mb)

Chapter 7 (pdf 1.88 Mb)

Chapter 8 (pdf 2.11 Mb)

Chapter 9 (pdf 2.21 Mb)

Chapters 10-11 (pdf 1.51 Mb)

Chapters 12-15 (pdf 1.25 Mb)