Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources, Mines and Processing Centres

An atlas of Australian mines is available at the NATIONAL MINES ATLAS website.

This site gives a history of Australia's minerals industry and it's role in Australia's economic development, and a GIS style portal to search on mines and mineral occurrences data.

The data on operating mines, mineral deposits and historic mines is that of the OZMIN Oracle relational database containing geological and resource information for Australian mineral deposits. OZMIN was compiled from published references and has been designed so that attribute information can be retrieved and analysed in relation to GIS spatial data. The national mineral deposits dataset contains data on over one thousand major and historically significant mineral deposits for 60 mineral commodities, including coal.

For example, this atlas shows the following mines in the area of New South Wales west of Sydney and the Blue Mountains, at a scale of about one to two million:

View 1: Mines west of Sydney (The darker symbols are mines currently in production)

View 1A: Mines west of Sydney, with latitude and longitude grid.

View 2: Mines west of Sydney with population centres and roads added.

View 3: Same view of mines west of Sydney with mineral occurrences added.

There are clearly innumerable mineral occurrences in comparison with the number of mines.

View 4: This shows the effect of zooming in on the above scene to towards its centre, around the town of Stuart Town. Clearly in this view there is a distinct concentration of (gold) occurrences just east of the town of Stuart Town, and the concentration has a northerly elongation. This area of gold occurrences was early designated as a goldfield (variously named the Muckerawa, Stoney Creek, Omigal, Ironbarks or Stuart Town goldfield throughout its history).

View 5: The same view, Stuart Town, at slightly higher and maximum zoom, and showing roads. This GIS/database cannot move in and add finer detail beyond a scale of 1:75000. For any finer detail information go to the NSW government’s DIGS database.