An area that was centred ~180 km north-northwest of Cook Siding on the Trans Australia Railway has been explored for economic buried Tertiary heavy mineral sands (HM) marine strandline or sandbar placer deposits by Iluka Resources. It covered cover ground occupying part of the Eocene to Miocene marginal marine depositional hinterland behind the Barton and Ooldea palaeocoastal sand ranges, and was the westernmost licence of Iluka's Group 4 tenure in SA. The entirety of the combined Group 4 tenement region was relatively under-explored prior to Iluka’s presence. Since 2004, this region has been subjected to first pass regional exploratory traverse-based drilling, with follow-up infill drilling campaigns performed in prospective areas. On the subject EL 4326/5529, work consisted of the drilling in July 2010 of 27 vertical open aircore holes along two traverses, for a total penetration of 677 m. No prospective sands were intersected. The best drill results were achieved in hole MAR0592 with an intercept of 1.0 m grading @ 0.8% HM, from 33 m depth. Iluka is aware that a well-defined paleochannel is located to the west of EL 5529, within an inaccessible (for mineral exploration) major conservation park. While this feature was once possibly a good source of HM input to the palaeocoastal depositional system, drilling done to date has not identified any HM accumulations in the vicinity of this feature. The company believes that any HM accumulation derived from this source is likely to be located further south than on the now surrendered area.