Thesis (Ph. D.)--Murdoch University, 1991. / Cover title. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 410-420).

The thesis analyses the continuum of European activity that preceded establishment of an effective pastoral industry in Australia's north-west. Two strands - physical activity and evolution of legislation - are interwoven, examining growth in geographical knowledge, proposals for colonisation and the outcome of interplay between government officials and landholders over land policy. Growth in geographical knowledge gave rise to colonisation proposals from 1828. The thesis relates these proposals to events affecting northern Australia to show that promotion and occupation of north-west lands constituted an integral part of the outgrowth of colonial settlement in Australia. Europeans occupied the north-west in two waves, abortively during the 1860s and continuously from 1879. The existing literature identifies these waves but provides inadequate analysis of events to 1884. The thesis fills this gap by showing that land hunger, misinformation, land speculation, manipulation of legislation and exploitation of political power for private commercial gain determined the shape of north-west settlement. Moreover, by relating land policy to tenure and occupation, it shows that private individuals influenced land policy and impeded official plans for rapid settlement. Thus, the thesis provides a fresh perspective not only on the prelude to effective pastoral settlement in the north-west but on the management of Western Australia's outlying lands in the period before responsible government.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Australia, 2006.

<Truncated abstract> The Neoproterozoic (815.4 ± 4.3 Ma) Aries kimberlite intrudes the King Leopold Sandstone and the Carson Volcanics in the central Kimberley Basin, northern Western Australia. Aries is comprised of a N-NNE-trending series of three diatremes and associated hypabyssal kimberlite dykes and plugs. The diatremes are volumetrically dominated by massive, clast-supported, accidental lithic-rich kimberlite breccias that were intruded by hypabyssal macrocrystic phlogopite kimberlite dykes and plugs with variably uniform- to globular segregationary-textured groundmasses. Lower diatremefacies, accidental lithic-rich breccias probably formed through fall-back of debris into the vent with a major contribution from the collapse of the vent walls. These massive breccias are overlain by a sequence of bedded volcaniclastic breccias in the upper part of the north lobe diatreme. Abundant, poorly-vesicular to nonvesicular, juvenile kimberlite ash and lapilli, with morphologies that are indicative of phreatomagmatic fragmentation processes, occur in a reversely-graded volcaniclastic kimberlite breccia unit at the base of this sequence. This unit and overlying bedded accidental lithic-rich breccias are interpreted to be sediment gravity-flow deposits (including possible debris flows) derived from the collapse of the crater walls and/or tephra ring deposits that surrounded the crater. ... This Fe-enrichment may have resulted from Fe-Mg exchange with olivine during slow cooling of the peridotite host rocks. Textures reflecting the cooling history of some mantle xenoliths are preserved in the form of fine exsolution rods of aluminous spinel in diopside and zircon in rutile grains in aluminous spinel- and rutile-bearing serpentinised ultramafic xenoliths, respectively. These textures suggest nearly isobaric cooling of host rocks in the lithospheric mantle, and indicate that at least some aluminous spinel in spinel-facies peridotites formed through exsolution from chromian 4 diopside. Episodes of Fe-Ti-rich metasomatism in the spinel-facies Kimberley mantle are the likely source of high-Ti phlogopite-biotite + rutile and Ti, V, Zn, Ni-enriched aluminous spinel ± ilmenite associations in several ultramafic xenoliths. U-Pb SHRIMP 207Pb/206Pb zircon ages for one granite (1851 ± 10 Ma) and two serpentinised ultramafic xenoliths (1845 ± 30 Ma; 1861 ± 31 Ma) indicate that the granitic basement and lower crust beneath the central Kimberley Basin are at least Palaeoproterozoic in age. However, Hf-isotope analyses of the zircons in the ultramafic xenoliths suggest that the underlying lithospheric mantle is at least late Archaean in age.