Qualla: Yeelirrie uranium project

Yeelirrie uranium project: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Its name, in the local Aboriginal language, is said to carry the weight of mourning, to weep, to grieve, and Yeelirrie has long been spoken of as a place of death. For the Tjiwarl people who hold native title over this country southwest of Wiluna, that meaning is not metaphor but inheritance, bound up with the Seven Sisters songline and sacred sites that run through the land. Beneath that same ground lies one of Australia's largest undeveloped uranium deposits. For half a century, those two truths have collided here, and for half a century the uranium has stayed in the ground, held back by crashing markets, a federal policy, a cluster of tiny blind creatures living in the water table, and the patient refusal of the people whose country this is.

Yeelirrie uranium project: A Deposit Bigger Than the Market

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

WMC Resources found the Yeelirrie deposit in mid-1971, and on paper it was enormous. As measured at the end of 2018, the resource stood at 58,100 tonnes of uranium oxide, around 128 million pounds, a quantity that places it among the most significant uranium prospects on the cont...

Yeelirrie uranium project: Stopped, Sold, Stopped Again

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Politics killed the first attempt. When Bob Hawke's Labor government came to power, its three-mine policy capped the number of operating uranium mines in Australia and shut Yeelirrie down by 1983. The deposit went into care and maintenance, where it would sit for decades. Ownersh...

Yeelirrie uranium project: The Creatures in the Dark Water

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The most unexpected obstacle came from below ground, in the form of animals almost nobody had ever seen. Yeelirrie sits above a rich habitat of stygofauna, minuscule creatures that live their entire lives in the dark of underground water, many of them found nowhere else on Earth....

Yeelirrie uranium project: The People Who Would Not Move

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Through every market cycle and corporate handover, one constant has held: the opposition of the Tjiwarl traditional owners. Senior Tjiwarl native title holders, together with conservation groups, challenged the 2017 approval in the Supreme Court of Western Australia and pursued t...