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Land access and Indigenous engagement for Australian geoscience

Created 20/01/2026

Updated 20/01/2026

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The Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program is unmatched for the scale of geoscience data acquisition across northern Australia, covering 37 648 individual land parcels and 2.9 million km2. The scale of works has raised many new challenges for Geoscience Australia (GA) through the diverse range of field activities, and the numerous stakeholders from different social and cultural backgrounds, across multiple jurisdictions. Success of the program depended on the development and maintenance of a social licence to operate. This was broadly achieved for fieldwork activities through early engagement with stakeholders, including free, prior and informed consent. Here, we present two case studies of stakeholder engagement for facilitation of data collection: one focuses on broadscale, low-impact field activities associated with the AusAEM survey; and the other on Indigenous-focused engagement related to the Barkly Seismic Survey. Because of the complexity of project planning and managing such a large number of stakeholders, GA’s project governance team was expanded; it now includes a dedicated Land and Marine Access team and a commitment to adopt world-leading engagement practices. One practice is to consider impacts and benefits for all stakeholders—not just landholders—of field activities and data acquisition programs. This includes a plan for how the data are delivered back to the communities and stakeholders, and how information exchanges can be built into projects. The aim is for stakeholders to hold GA in the highest regard and understand the benefits to the Australian people, and ultimately their own communities, from the geoscientific data that GA produces.

Citation: Mouthaan, R., Buchanan, S. and Sweeney, M, 2020. Land access and Indigenous engagement for Australian geoscience. In: Czarnota, K., Roach, I., Abbott, S., Haynes, M., Kositcin, N., Ray, A. and Slatter, E. (eds.) Exploring for the Future: Extended Abstracts, Geoscience Australia, Canberra, 1–4.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title Land access and Indigenous engagement for Australian geoscience
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/en/dataset/6783a406-ad45-43a1-a399-859bd9344be5
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 08/04/2019
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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Data Portal data.gov.au

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on data.gov.au "Land access and Indigenous engagement for Australian geoscience". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/land-access-and-indigenous-engagement-for-australian-geoscience4