Aboriginal Heritage Places in Western Australia, Status Snapshot

A static snapshot from 30 June 2023 documents places in Western Australia reported under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage maintains this retired dataset, which categorizes places as Registered Sites, Lodged information, or Stored Data/Not a Site. It has been replaced by three new datasets under the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021.

Use Cases

• Map reported Aboriginal heritage locations based on the described status categories.
• Analyze the distribution of Registered Sites versus Lodged or non-site records across Western Australia.
• Support due diligence for land development by identifying areas with potential heritage concerns.
• Study the transition of heritage records from the 1972 Act to the 2021 Act framework.

Strengths

• Provides a clear temporal snapshot as of 30 June 2023.
• Categorizes records into three distinct legal statuses defined by the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972.
• Authored by the authoritative government department responsible for planning and heritage.

Limitations

• The dataset is retired and static; users are directed to newer replacement datasets.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic and procedural bias inherent to the reporting and assessment system.

Provenance

Source

Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, Western Australia.

Collection Method

Reported to the Registrar of Aboriginal Sites and assessed under Section 5 of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 2023-06-30.

Freshness

Static snapshot as of 2023-06-30; metadata last updated 2026-06-22.

Geography

Western Australia.