A Different Reading of Darling Range Bauxite

Roy Woodall, an old government bulletin and the start of an alumina industry

In April 1957 a young geologist called Roy Woodall left San Francisco by ship for Western Australia, after a master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley. He went back to work for Western Mining Corporation in Kalgoorlie.

Not long after, the company's chairman, Lindesay Clark, wrote to his chief geologist, Don Campbell. The big bauxite deposits at Weipa in Queensland had just been found, and Clark wanted to know whether there was any chance of finding bauxite in Western Australia. The letter pointed to the bauxitic laterites already known in the Darling Range, east and south of Perth.

Campbell's office was next door to Woodall's. Woodall told the story to Richard Stanton for the Australian Academy of Science in 2008, and his summary of what happened next was short. "Don asked me to investigate!"

Within a few years that question had grown into Alcoa of Australia, the Kwinana refinery and the Jarrahdale mine. I like this story because it started at a desk, with a report that other people had already read.

KALGOORLIE, 1957

A report in the office library

WMC was still a small gold company in 1957. The gold price was fixed at US$35 an ounce, and Clark was looking for ways to diversify.

Woodall went to the small library in the Kalgoorlie office. In his 2008 account he says he "rummaged through the limited library that was in the office and found a volume written by the Bureau of Mineral Resources." The Bureau of Mineral Resources was the Commonwealth geological agency, now Geoscience Australia. The volume was Bulletin 24, "Bauxite in Australia", by H.B. Owen, published in 1954. The Darling Range section is on pages 143 to 147.

Woodall's memory was that the bulletin treated the Darling Range deposits as low-grade, high in silica and relatively low in alumina. Then he noticed the form the silica took. "Reading that, I noticed that the silica was in the form of quartz."

In our geological jargon

Bauxite is the rock that aluminium comes from. It is made mostly of aluminium hydroxide minerals. Its grade is quoted as alumina, which is aluminium oxide and also the white powder a refinery makes from it. In Western Australia it forms in laterite, a hard, red-brown, often pebbly layer left behind when rock near the surface weathers for millions of years in a warm, wet climate.

To get the alumina out, refineries use the Bayer process. The alumina in the bauxite is dissolved in hot caustic soda, then brought back out of solution, and the rest is left behind as residue. The silica in bauxite has a big effect on that cost. Silica locked up in clay minerals dissolves in the caustic soda and uses it up. That costs money on every tonne. Silica in the form of quartz grains hardly reacts with the caustic soda. It just dilutes the ore. Woodall called it "merely an inert diluent."

Woodall's point was that if most of the silica was quartz, then the high silica figure did not mean an expensive ore to refine. It meant a lower-grade ore that refined cleanly. He told Campbell he thought the deposits could make good bauxite. There was a second advantage that Woodall says he did not realise at the time. The alumina mineral in Western Australian bauxite is gibbsite. Woodall contrasted it with the boehmite in the Queensland ore. Gibbsite dissolves at a lower temperature, so the refining is cheaper again.

CANBERRA AND PERTH, 1941 AND 1954

What the earlier reports said

The earlier documents show that the quartz had been noticed before. Owen's 1954 bulletin says on page 143, "In many samples a great part of the silica was present as grains of quartz, which would not appreciably increase the consumption of alkali used for extraction of alumina." On page 13 it sets out the general rule that quartz, unless very finely divided, "is not appreciably attacked by caustic soda solution."

Earlier still, in September 1941, the Commonwealth Copper and Bauxite Committee inspected the laterite at Sawyers Valley, Beechina Hill, Werribee and Toodyay. Its report to the Minister for Supply and Development said there were "very large reserves of gibbsitic bauxite available" and that in nearly all the deposits the silica "is present mainly as quartz." One of the men who signed that report was Harold Raggatt, later Director of the Bureau of Mineral Resources.

In 2008 Woodall quoted Raggatt's description of a discoverer as "someone who sees what everyone else sees but thinks what no-one else has thought before." He called the Darling Range "a classic case" of it.

The difference was in what each report did with the observation. The 1941 committee wrote that if the quartz could be removed cheaply, a relatively high-grade bauxite would be available. Woodall said much the same about removing it. His main point was that, left in, it did no harm in the refinery. Owen's bulletin of 1954 said that in Western Australia "systematic testing of known bauxite occurrences has not yet been undertaken", so it could not count any reserves. It also named Western Australia as a place where further exploration may reveal commercially valuable deposits. Woodall read the quartz as a reason to go and peg the ground, which in our geological jargon means marking out and claiming it. Western Mining did that.

THE DARLING RANGE, 1957 TO 1964

From pegging to the first shipment

Phil McFadden's 2023 memoir of Woodall says WMC took up more than 16,000 square kilometres of the Darling Range in eight Temporary Reserves. Alcoa's history says that within a year the deposits had been outlined.

Encouraged by the results, WMC brought in two other Australian companies, Broken Hill South and North Broken Hill, and formed a new company, Western Aluminium NL. None of them knew how to refine bauxite. So they went to the Aluminum Company of America, offering a partnership in exchange for the capital and the technology.

Alcoa of Australia was formed in June 1961 and granted a 12,619 square kilometre bauxite lease by the Western Australian Government. In July 1963 the Jarrahdale bauxite mine and the Kwinana alumina refinery both opened. In February 1964 the first shipment of Kwinana alumina left for Japan.

By the standards of the rest of the world this was low-grade ore. The State Library of Western Australia gives the grade as more than 27 per cent aluminium oxide, and says it takes about seven tonnes of bauxite to make one tonne of aluminium. McFadden puts it at around 27 to 30 per cent, against roughly 50 per cent in the best Queensland bauxite, and still calls the Western Australian operation the lowest-cost alumina producer in the world. In McFadden's account, it was what Woodall saw in the ore that let the low grade work.

In his Berkeley oral history Woodall says Don Campbell ran the drilling and evaluation that followed. Woodall was sent north to open up a copper project at the Tarraji River in the Kimberley. He says having little to do with the evaluation was a disappointment.

The bauxite was in the jarrah forest, which was also timber country and part of Perth's water catchment. Woodall recalled that Clark insisted from the start on careful exploration and mining there. That forest has been an issue for the industry ever since, and Samso has written about the more recent arguments in The Strategic Importance of Bauxite.

Mining at Jarrahdale ended in 1998, and the pits were rehabilitated. By 2016 Alcoa had mined one billion tonnes of bauxite in Western Australia.

LOOKING BACK

The value of an old report

In his 2004 oral history the word discovery appears in quote marks when Woodall talks about the bauxite. The laterite had been known for decades, and the quartz had been noted in two earlier reports. What Woodall added was the recommendation that it was worth acting on, at a time when the company was looking for something new.

Most of what we know about Woodall's part comes from his two interviews, and McFadden's memoir draws on the 2008 one. Alcoa's history and the State Library credit WMC rather than any one person.

Jon Hronsky, who was mentored by Woodall at WMC, talked about Woodall's thinking on how to consolidate ground in his Coffee with Samso conversation in 2025. I see the Darling Range as an early example of the same instinct. Once the idea made sense, WMC took up ground at district scale.

In exploration today we still spend a lot of time in old reports. In Western Australia most of them are on WAMEX, the state's open-file library of exploration reports. Most of what is in those reports has been read before. Occasionally one of them holds an observation that was right all along and simply never acted on.

What have you read more than once before you saw what was in it?

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A note on the sources

Woodall's recollections are from his 2008 interview with Richard Stanton for the Australian Academy of Science, Conversations with Australian Scientists, and his 2004 oral history with Eleanor Swent for the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (2006), which is paraphrased here and not quoted. The memoir is Phil McFadden, Roy Woodall 1930 to 2021, Historical Records of Australian Science 34(2) (2023). The earlier records are H.B. Owen, Bauxite in Australia, BMR Bulletin 24 (1954), of which I read the introduction, the summary of reserves, the Western Australian section and the reference list, and the Commonwealth Copper and Bauxite Committee's Sixth Report (1941). Company dates are from Alcoa Australia's history timeline and grades from the State Library of Western Australia.

The Words According To Samso is about sharing the experiences of decades in my journey. These are stories and news I have heard, brought back to life in 2026. Many of them have been told before, and The Words According To Samso is now bringing them back to readers, to share with those interested in 2026 and with future generations. No tickers, no research, no opinions on what anyone should own. samso.com.au