The War Over $40 Billion Worth of Critical Minerals in Australia

The Black Sands Dilemma: Victoria’s Ancient Beaches and the Battle Beneath the Farmland

There’s a war raging in western Victoria.
Not one of bullets or politics, but of land — between big mining companies chasing critical minerals and farmers who’ve lived on their piece of country for generations.

On one side stand families whose livelihoods depend on the health of their soil, people whose roots go back as far as their crops. On the other are the mining companies backed by billions in investment, promising jobs, prosperity, and the minerals that will drive the world’s renewable energy revolution.

And caught between them is a landscape that has already lived a dozen lives — a place that was once an ancient shoreline half a billion years ago, later a shallow sea full of black sands, and now a patchwork of golden paddocks concealing what could be the next frontier of rare earth mining.

This isn’t a simple story of good guys and bad guys. It’s a collision between two kinds of time — geological and biological — and two kinds of inheritance: the minerals of the deep Earth, and the living soil of the surface. But to be real with you straight off the bat, I don’t know which side I stand on. I see both sides and totally understand them. So I suppose that means I’ll try to present this video in a balanced way.

The First Beaches — When Victoria Was Being Born

But to really understand what’s at stake beneath those farms near Horsham, Donald, and Swan Hill, we need to go back — way back — to when Victoria itself was being built. We are a geology channel after all.

Four to five hundred million years ago, the area that would one day become western Victoria sat on the edge of the supercontinent Gondwana. The land was young, raw, and unstable — a long stretch of continental margin facing the ocean, with volcanic arcs and deep trenches marking where new crust was forming and old crust was being swallowed.

In that world, what’s now Victoria’s western uplands — around the Stawell, Glenelg, and the Grampians regions — were beaches and shallow seas. Rivers dumped sand and mud into coastal basins, where they settled in layers. Over millions of years, those sediments were buried, squeezed, folded, and metamorphosed into hard quartzite and schist — the backbone of Victoria’s western highlands.

So yes — western Victoria really was a beach, once. A shoreline of the Ordovician and Silurian eras, lapped by ancient waves and teeming with early marine life. When we look at those quartzite ridges today, we’re looking at the cemented remains of sandbars that once marked the edge of the ancient Australian continent.

It’s poetic, in a way — those same rocks, those ancient beaches, are the original source of the minerals now being fought over. Because from those ancient sands came the zircon, rutile, ilmenite, and monazite grains that weathered, washed, and eventually settled again in younger deposits — the black sands lying beneath modern farmland.

*Image depicts the location of the ancient beach deposits.

The Return of the Sea — The Second Generation of Beaches

Fast-forward to the Late Miocene and Pliocene, between about six and three million years ago. By then, Victoria had eroded into a subdued landscape of rolling hills and river plains. To the north and west lay a great depression — the Murray Basin — slowly filling with sediment from the Victorian highlands.

Then came the sea once more.
Global sea levels rose modestly — not catastrophic floods, but enough to push shallow marine waters far inland across what is now the Wimmera and Mallee. Over time, the coastline advanced and retreated repeatedly, laying down long curving beach ridges — “strandlines” — as each wave of the sea built new barriers of sand and gravel.

These are known today as the Loxton–Parilla Sands, and they stretch in broad arcs across western Victoria, buried just beneath the soil. In those Neogene beaches, the same heavy minerals that once formed in the Ordovician sands were concentrated again by wave action — a geological recycling event that created vast black-sand deposits.

When the sea finally retreated for the last time, it left behind a landscape that looked much like today’s — flat, dry, and fertile — but beneath it lay an inheritance millions of years in the making.

*Image depicts the Murray Basin filled with water. The black lines represent shorelines with heavy mineral sands deposits as water levels rose and fell throughout time. This is just a visual demonstration for explanation purposes only. It does not accurately depict shoreline locations, it aims to explain it, instead.

The New Gold Rush — Rare Earths and Mineral Sands

Now, those buried strandlines are at the heart of a 21st-century resource rush.
Companies like VHM (Goschen Project) near Lalbert, WIM Resource (Avonbank) near Horsham, and Astron (Donald Project) near Minyip and Donald, are pushing to mine these deposits for their titanium, zircon, and rare earth content — essential for electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defence technologies.

The promise is enormous: billions in potential exports, hundreds of jobs, and a domestic supply of critical minerals that could strengthen Australia’s role in the renewable-energy economy. To the mining companies, the black sands of western Victoria represent opportunity — a chance for rural towns to prosper again, and for Australia to secure resources the world desperately needs.

But to the farmers who live there, it feels like the ground is being pulled out from beneath them — literally.

The Farmers’ Side — More Than Just the Soil

Farmers across the Wimmera and Mallee are fighting these projects not because they oppose progress, but because they don’t believe the price will stop at the fence line. Their objections are many, but they all boil down to one theme: once you dig up the land, it’s never truly the same again.

But here’s just a few of the potential issues farmers are worried about. Many of the heavy minerals being mined — especially monazite and xenotime — contain trace amounts of uranium and thorium. Farmers fear these radioactive elements could end up in dust, tailings, or runoff, contaminating their properties.
They rely on rainwater tanks for drinking and household water; if dust settles on roofs, even low-level radioactive particles could make their way into tanks and food systems. There’s also anxiety about long-term exposure for workers, livestock, and nearby families.

Some see this as a backdoor around Victoria’s uranium mining ban — since uranium would be mined incidentally as a by-product of rare earth extraction. It’s not a technicality that sits comfortably with people whose families drink and grow food off the same land.

The mines also need vast quantities of water for processing and dust control, and most of that will be drawn from local aquifers.
Farmers worry that pumping groundwater could alter the water table, drawing down levels on surrounding farms or pushing saline water upward — a real threat in areas where salinity is already an issue. Others fear that “mounding” from reinjected or displaced groundwater could flood paddocks or interfere with subsurface drainage.

In flood years, tailings ponds and containment dams could overflow, spilling contaminated water into creeks or wetlands. With increasingly erratic rainfall and a landscape prone to both drought and flood, it’s a risk they say regulators underestimate.

But for farmers, the most painful issue is simple: losing arable land.
Once mining begins, sections of farmland will be out of production for years or decades. Even when rehabilitation is complete, few believe the soil will ever match its former productivity. The finely tuned structure that supports high yields — the balance of clay, sand, organic matter, and water retention — is nearly impossible to replicate after the land has been turned, compacted, and reshaped.

Many suspect that “rehabilitated” land will be fit for pasture at best, not intensive cropping. And while the mine eventually moves on, the scars — physical and economic — remain.

Two Visions of Value

To the miners, this is progress — a way to transform a sleepy agricultural region into a cornerstone of Australia’s critical-minerals future.
To the farmers, it’s a gamble with no reset button.

The dilemma isn’t about who’s right or wrong. It’s about two visions of value that can’t occupy the same ground. One measures worth in tonnes and royalties; the other measures it in seasons and generations.

Even the government seems torn — eager to champion renewable energy but hesitant to confront the human cost of extracting the materials it depends on.

Caught in the Middle

I don’t know which side to stand on.
Part of me sees the logic of mining — the extraordinary geological inheritance lying under the soil, formed through millions of years of Earth’s slow labour. Extracting it could strengthen Australia’s economy, reduce reliance on unstable markets, and build the very technologies needed for a cleaner future.

But another part of me sees the faces of those farmers — people who’ve lived on the same ground for decades, who measure time not by profits but by harvests, who fear that once the excavators arrive, their way of life will vanish.

It’s hard to argue with either vision. Both are rooted in truth. Both hold a kind of justice.

An Unresolved Future

Western Victoria is now a frontier between two eras: the geological and the agricultural.
Above ground, wheat ripples in the wind. Beneath it lies the fossilized memory of ancient coastlines — the same waves that once built the continent now threatening to rewrite its surface again.

No matter which side wins, something will be lost. Either the minerals will stay buried, and the opportunity will pass, or the land will be dug up, and something irreplaceable will change forever.

And maybe that’s the hardest truth to accept — that there might not be a solution at all, just a choice between two kinds of permanence: the permanence of what we build, and the permanence of what we destroy.

As I look at it now, I still don’t know which side to stand on.
And I suspect this dilemma — between farms and black sands, between what grows and what’s buried — won’t resolve itself anytime soon.

Here's the video we made on this on the OzGeology YouTube Channel: