The first discovery of bauxite in South Gippsland which was brought to public notice is said to .have been made in 1918 by Mr. Donald Clarke on the property known as Nahoo , allotment 8, Parish of Narracan South. Bauxite from this deposit has been used for chemical purposes for over twenty years. It is understood that other occurrences had been noted prior to Mr Clarke's report. Eleven additional discoveries were made from time to time up to April, 1942, when the extensive prospecting programme mentioned in the foreword was undertaken. In the short time that has elapsed since then a further twelve deposits have .been discovered, making a total of 24 deposits in the adjoining parishes of Moe, Allambee East, Narracan South, Mirboo and Budgeree in the county of Buln Buln. Several of these deposits have been systematically tested by shaft sinking and boring. The deposits at Boolarra, Oallignee and Nahoo have been reported on very briefly by Whitelaw (1921), Ferguson (1936) and Baragwanath (1940), but there have been no detailed descriptions of the deposits and no general account of their geological relationships. It should be noted that there has been no authenticated report of the occurrence of bauxite in Victoria outside South Gippsland and that little is known of the deposits other than those in the Boolarra-Mirboo North area.

Lower Proterozoic sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks of the Pine Creek Geosyncline and Nimbuwah Complex form the basement rocks of the Bathurst Terrace. To the west of the Bathurst Terrace, along the eastern edge of the adjoining Bonaparte Gulf Basin, Phanerozoic sedimentation commenced in the Early Permian and led to the accumulation of a conformable sequence comprising the Kulshill, Hyland Bay, and Mount Goodwin Formations, and an unnamed Middle to Upper Triassic formation. It was not until the Late Jurassic that the sea transgressed onto the Bathurst Terrace to deposit the Petrel Formation, followed by the Bathurst Island Formation in the Cretaceous, and the Van Diemen Sandstone in the Early Tertiary. In the Late Cretaceous and Tertiary, chemical weathering produced an extensive cover of laterite. Mineral sands containing ilmenite, zircon, and rutile occur along the northern and western coasts of Bathurst and Melville Islands. Uneconomical deposits of bauxite crop out on the northern headlands of Cobourg Peninsula and Croker Island. In addition, uneconomical deposits of uranium, manganese, phosphate, limestone, clay, and hydrocarbons have been found in the area. Subartesian water is available on Bathurst and Melville Islands from aquifers in the Van Diemen Sandstone, and artesian water was discovered in the Marligur Member of the Bathurst Island Formation in the southern Cobourg Peninsula Sheet area.

The Amadeus Basin is one of Australia's most important sedimentary basins, both scientifically and economically. Scientifically its significance stems from the fact that it contains some of Australia's best preserved and best exposed Proterozoic and Palaeozoic sequences which provide us with a window on the early history of the continent. Economically, it derives its importance from the fact that those same sequences host commercially exploitable oil, gas and groundwater, as well as resources of potential future value such as evaporites and phosphate. Therefore it is not surprising that the Bureau of Mineral Resources has been involved in geological studies in the basin for many years. The first major phase of investigations was undertaken in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when BMR carried out a program of 1:250 000 mapping and geophysical investigations. This work successfully provided the starting point for most subsequent research and exploration in the basin. Since that first phase, however, much new information has been collected by industry, the universities and the Northern Territory Geological Survey Also, some of the earlier ideas were not correct or needed modification and there was obviously a need to bring all the new information together. Additionally, more sophisticated geophysical and remote-sensing techniques potentially provided the opportunity to develop a better understanding of the basin and particularly its deep structure. It was therefore decided in 1983, after consultation with industry and the geoscientific community, to undertake a new and comprehensive multidisciplinary study of the basin in order to provide the best possible basis for resource assessment and exploration in the future. Like all other work in the BMR, it was seen as essential to the success of the project to work closely with industry, the universities and the Northern Territory Geological Survey, and this same approach is evident in this Bulletin, with many of the authors being from outside BMR. The success of any project is inevitably judged on the quality and in part by the quantity of the scientific output. Already the Amadeus Basin Project has produced a large number of scientific papers, and, together with this Bulletin, associated databases, and maps and cross-sections in the soon to be published 1:1 000 000- scale Amadeus Basin Map Folio, it can be judged a great success. However, the ultimate test of the project's success, namely the extent to which it enables us to more successfully explore for, and more accurately assess, mineral, energy and groundwater resources, is perhaps less tangible and much longer term. It may take several years for a viable exploration target to be developed from concepts arising from the current project and even longer before commercial exploitation is possible. For example, more than 20 years was to elapse from the initial geological investigations at the Mereenie Anticline to the first output of commercial oil from that structure. Nevertheless, I am confident that the results and the ideas arising from these recent investigations will indeed have a very positive effect on resource assessment and exploration in the Amadeus Basin for many years to come. I am equally confident that many of the scientific ideas and concepts developed in the Amadeus Basin through this co-operation between industry, academia and government, and outlined in this Bulletin, will find application in many other sedimentary basins in Australia and elsewhere. The bulk of the work in the Amadeus Basin Project was carried out under the auspices of the former Division of Continental Geology and its Chief Dr Peter Cook.

Contents: 1. Some early cretaceous plant microfossils from Queensland/ by D. Burger. 2. Palynological observations in the Officer Basin, Western Australia/by E.M. Kemp.

This Bulletin is a monograph of the trilobites of the subfamily Xystridurinae, and an appraisal of their organization, morphology, ecology, and systematic relations. The taxa here described constitute a substantial addition to the Ordian fauna dominated by the species of Redlichia (Opik, 1970), and t6 the Templetonian fauna; and have provided a supplementary stratigraphic scale within the Cambrian. Since the time of its introduction by F. W. Whitehouse in 1936 the name Xystridura (sp., sp. indet., sp.nov.) has.become a very common palaeontological designation in papers dealing with the Cambrian of the Northern Territory and Queensland, published and unpublished. The material exploited here has been selected from collections belonging to the Bureau of Mineral Resources accumulated between 1948 and 1962; the initial manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1953 and the collections were greatly depleted. The lost material, however, was subsequently restored, and even substantially increased by the Ordian forms, by the discovery of Galahetes, and by collections from New South Wales. Nevertheless the rehabilitation of the morphogenic history of Xystridura is somewhat incomplete and therefore dogmatic in parts. I collected the larger part of these fossils either in company with the field geologists of this Bureau, or on my own; other contributions were made by geologists of the Bureau. Names of some are mentioned in the text, and of others in my earlier papers; once more I thank them all for the assistance received.

pt. 1. Igneous and metamorphic -- pt. 2. Sedimentary rocks -- pt. 3. Igneous and metamorphic

A correlation chart for the Triassic System in Australia is presented. The base of the System in Australia is taken as the earliest occurrence of the Lunatisporites pellucidus Assemblage Zone in a section of the Rewan Formation in the Bowen Basin, Queensland, and the base of the Jurassic System as the occurrence of Ceratosporites helidonensis with ClassopoWs and Retitriletes austroclavatitides in the Upper Woogaroo Subgroup in a section near Ipswich in the Moreton Basin. Correlations within Australia are based predominantly on microfioral evidence with supporting evidence from fossil vertebrates and, to a minor degree, on macrofiora. Correlation of Australian units with those in other continents depends on ammonites, bivalves, conodonts, vertebrates, and microfiora in Lower Triassic units; and on vertebrates and microfiora in higher units. A cross-indexed bibliography on the Triassic System in Australia covering 21 years to the end of 1973 is also provided.

Standard curves for the interpretation of magnetic anomalies due to thin finite dykes were computed for various ratios of dyke length (measured down the dip) to depth of burial. Families of curves for a given field inclination and dip of dyke are produced for various ratios of dyke length to depth of burial. The curves so produced are suitable for interpretation of anomalies in the intensity of the vertical, horizontal, and total field.

The main island of Papua New Guinea has been formed by long-continued interaction between the Australian Plate in the southwest, and the Pacific Plate in the northeast. Between these two major crustal elements, whose components in Papua New Guinea are referred to as the platform and the oceanic crust and island arcs, is a highly deformed mobile belt about 150 km wide. The platform consists of stable continental crust of Palaeozoic crystalline rocks overlain by Mesozoic and Tertiary sedimentary rocks, which because they have been protected by the crystalline basement from the deforming forces so active in the mobile belt are mostly flat-lying or only gently warped. The mobile belt, in contrast to the platform, has been deformed from time to time since at least the late Mesozoic and so has been an unsettled sedimentary environment. It was the repository of a great variety of geosynclinal sediments markedly different from those of the platform, but probably its most striking feature is its great intensity of faulting. It has also been the site of widespread igneous activity in contrast to the platform, in which there was no igneous activity from the early Mesozoic until the onset of volcanism in the Pliocene. Several fault wedges in the mobile belt contain Mesozoic rocks similar to those of the platform, and may be detached fragments of the platform. The oceanic crust and island arcs provides a third contrasting geological environment. The fundamental fault zones forming the northeastern margin of the mobile belt mark an abrupt change from rocks with continental affinities (metamorphosed geosynclinal sediments and associated plutonic rocks) to rocks with oceanic affinities, which consist of: (i) an ophiolite sequence, probably representing upfaulted Mesozoic and Early Tertiary oceanic crust; and (ii) the products of island-arc volcanism consisting of Tertiary subaerial and submarine lavas, pyroclastics, and volcanolithic sediments. The rocks of the oceanic crust and island arcs have reacted to stress generally by broadly folding, and faulting along major widely separated crustal fractures. During the Mesozoic, sedimentation followed a fairly consistent pattern: shelf-type sediments were deposited over the platform, and geosynclinal sediments and minor volcanics were deposited in a trough established by the Late Cretaceous along its northern and northeastern margins. The oldest rocks in the oceanic crust and island arcs are Late Cretaceous ophiolites and island-arc volcanics. The same pattern persisted into the Eocene, until a major orogeny resulting from increased plate interaction in the late Eocene or more likely, the Oligocene formed a belt of low to moderate grade metamorphics along the length of the mobile belt. This event was reflected in the platform by erosion and non deposition, and in the oceanic crust and island arcs as widespread island-arc volcanism. The early Miocene saw another fundamental change, with the deposition of shelf sediments (mainly limestone) in the oceanic crust and island arcs and the platform, and trough type sediments along the mobile belt. Volcanic activity burst forth along the length of the mobile belt in the middle Miocene, but was not reflected in either the oceanic crust and island arcs or the platform, where limestones continued to be deposited. By the late Pliocene the main landmasses of Papua New Guinea had been formed, and the later history is notable for the widespread volcanism which for the first time affected all three provinces simultaneously.

Originally it was intended that the calcium and magnesium carbonate rocks and others rich in one or other of these elements should be published as a Bulletin, being Part III of a series of which Part I (Bulletin 65, already published) contained analyses of igneous and metamorphic rocks and Part II (Bulletin 78, already published) contained analyses of non-carbonate and non-phosphate sedimentary rocks. However, owing to the rising cost of publication and to the fact that the analyses of most carbonate rocks are only partial analyses, Part III has not been published although the compilation was completed in 1967. As in the case of Parts I and II the literature was searched for analyses made before 1960 as the introduction of rapid methods of analysis has made available a great flood of chemical data familiar to present research workers, and it was thought that easy access to older analyses may prove useful to them.