Six of the 31 heavy mineral sands (HM) exploration licences that were originally granted to Iluka Resources (Iluka) in September 2009 (which then were designated as Iluka's tenement Group 4) have recently been fully surrendered, because they are now regarded as covering terranes which are non-prospective for discovering a mineable HM deposit, or the hypothesised HM potential of their sediments has become sterilized through drilling. These six licences, which formerly occupied the northern part of the Group 4 region, all lay in very remote locations, and their distance from any existing transportation infrastructure meant that any HM deposit found on them would carry a significant transport penalty. Therefore discovery of a significant sized deposit would be necessary to allow for a much higher cost of subsequent production, and this scenario did not happen. During the Group 4 licences' 2010 joint reporting year, on five of the subject now surrendered licences, a total of 94 exploratory open vertical aircore holes were drilled mainly along portions of regional reconnaissance drill traverses, for a combined total penetration of 2277.6 m. No drilling was done on EL 4342 (because by that time Iluka's prior drilling conducted on its adjoining licences had shown that this area probably contained no prospective sands, and those drillholes had not encountered anomalous amounts of HM). Only 81 x selected 1.5 m interval drill cuttings samples were submitted for laboratory heavy mineral analysis, yielding a best result of 6 m @ 3.4% HM from below 1.5 m depth in hole MAR1586, but mineralogical examination of the HM concentrates separated from the 8 samples assayed found that the whole HM grain assemblage comprises worthless iron oxide secondary induration minerals. Similar but thinner and lesser grade intercepts were also made in a few other drillholes.