Western Australia exempts two million hectares in West Kimberley from mining

The Acting Executive Director, Resource Tenure, Jared Andrew Barnett, has varied a 2015 exemption to close 2,014,420.31 hectares of the West Kimberley Mineral Field to Divisions 1 to 5 of Part IV of the Mining Act 1978 until 1 February 2027. The instrument was made under section 19 of that Act and published in the Western Australian Government Gazette No. 128 of Friday 9 October 2026 as notice MP401, at page 2276.

The notice is an Instrument of Variation to Exemption of Land. It does not create a new reserve: it varies the exemption of land originally declared on 3 February 2015 and published in the Government Gazette dated 13 February 2015, replacing the earlier description with the one set out in the new instrument. The exemption applies to land that is not private land and is not the subject of a mining tenement or an application for a mining tenement.

The land and its official description

The instrument identifies the affected country by locality, plan designation, area and departmental record:

• Locality: West Kimberley Mineral Field.
• Land designated S19/361 in the TENGRAPH electronic plan of the Department of Mines, Petroleum and Exploration.
• Area of land: 2,014,420.31 hectares.
• Geospatial description filed in the Department of Mines, Petroleum and Exploration electronic file number A1164/201101, document ID A115948987, with a plan at document ID A115849788.

Because the boundary is carried by the Department’s electronic mapping and geospatial file rather than by a metes-and-bounds description printed in the gazette, the S19/361 designation in TENGRAPH is the operative reference for anyone checking whether a particular parcel falls inside the exempt area.

Who decided, and under what power

The instrument is signed by Jared Andrew Barnett as A/Executive Director, Resource Tenure, and dated at Perth on 30 September 2026. The power exercised is section 19 of the Mining Act 1978, the provision under which land may be exempted from Part IV of that Act.

The exemption runs to 1 February 2027. Until that date the designated land sits outside Divisions 1 to 5 of Part IV of the Mining Act 1978, so the tenement provisions covered by those divisions do not apply to it.

Publication and surrounding notices

The variation appears in the Minerals and Petroleum section of the Western Australian Government Gazette No. 128, published in Perth on Friday 9 October 2026. The same edition carries notices in the Fisheries, Justice, Local Government, Planning, Police and Public Notices sections, including the Western Australian Planning Commission’s North Ellenbrook (West and East) amendment 1461/23 in the City of Swan.

The gazette is published by the Government Printer for the State of Western Australia on Tuesday and Friday of each week unless disrupted by public holidays or unforeseen circumstances.

The variation keeps roughly two million hectares of the West Kimberley outside the State’s mining tenement system for a further period, and shifts the authoritative description of that land from the 2015 gazette text to the Department’s electronic file A1164/201101. For explorers, tenure holders and anyone tracking land status in the region, the S19/361 boundary as redefined on 9 October 2026 is the reference that now governs until 1 February 2027.

Source: Western Australian Government Gazette, No. 128, 9 October 2026, Minerals and Petroleum, p. 2276 (official reference: MP401).