Who owns WA's tenements? Every title, traced to its ASX owner

BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue hold no WA tenements in their own names. Search the register for "BHP Group Limited" and you get nothing back. The ground is all there, held by BHP Minerals, BHP Nickel West and BHP Iron Ore (Jimblebar). Rio's sits under Hamersley Iron, Robe River Mining, Mount Bruce Mining and a dozen more. Fortescue's is held by FMG Pilbara, Chichester Metals and FMG Resources.

That is how the register works. It records who holds each title and says nothing about who owns the holder. For a major that is an annoyance. For a company you have never heard of, it is the whole question: whose ground is this, really?

We have spent the last week answering that for the whole state. NextMaps now traces every WA tenement through its subsidiaries to the listed company that owns it.

Northern Star, 162 titles or 1,083?

Northern Star is a good example of how far off the register view can be. Search for Northern Star Resources and you will find 162 titles, the ones it holds in its own name. The real figure is 1,083 live titles across 16 entities: Northern Star (KLV), Northern Star (Saracen Kalgoorlie), Northern Star (Carosue Dam), Kanowna Mines and the rest. More than four in five of its titles sit under a name that is not "Northern Star Resources".

Across WA, almost half of all tenements trace back to a listed company or a major. Until now, working that out meant knowing every subsidiary name in advance and adding them up yourself.

Colour the map by owner

Under the Tenements layer there is a new toggle: Colour by owner (ASX & majors). Turn it on and every title is coloured by the company that owns it. The legend ranks the ten biggest owners in view and updates as you pan, so the Pilbara reads as Fortescue, BHP and Rio, and the Goldfields as Northern Star, Genesis, Gold Fields and Westgold.

Click a company in the legend and everything else fades, leaving only its ground. From there, Watch adds the whole company to your watchlist in one click.

Grey means we found no listed or major parent. It does not mean the title is privately held. The map covers companies that file with the ASX, plus a short list of unlisted majors we map by hand, including Gold Fields, Hancock and AngloGold Ashanti.

Search by company or ticker

The search bar at the top of the map now understands corporate groups. Type "NST" or "Northern Star" and the group comes up first, with a count of its entities. One click selects every entity and zooms to its ground. Ordinary holder results are labelled too, so a Pty Ltd you do not recognise tells you who owns it before you click.

Watchlists and alerts that follow the company

Subsidiaries come and go. A group picks up an entity through an acquisition, or sets up a new one for a project. So watchlist groups and alerts you create from a company are linked to its ticker, not frozen as a list of today's names. When a new filing names a new subsidiary, it is added for you.

For alerts, choose Holder Names and search for the company. The group row adds every entity in one go, each as its own chip you can see and remove. Holder alerts are instant: new applications reach you within minutes of being lodged, and surrenders and withdrawals arrive with DMPE's 4:30pm batch each business day.

Where the ownership comes from

Since the 2024 financial year, every Australian public company has had to publish a Consolidated Entity Disclosure Statement in its annual report. It lists every entity the company controls, not just the material ones. We read the latest statement for each listed company with WA ground and matched its entities against the tenement register. A parent's own name counts as part of its group, so a company that holds some ground directly and the rest through subsidiaries shows up as one owner.

A few things worth knowing:

• Ownership is as at the filing date, which is shown wherever the group appears. For most companies that is 30 June.
• Joint ventures show every owner. A title co-held by two groups carries both.
• A tenement schedule never builds a group. A schedule shows who is on a title, not who owns them, so we only use the entity lists companies are required to disclose.

Free on every company page

The ownership facts are also public on our explorer pages. Hamersley Iron now says it is part of Rio Tinto. Parent pages such as Rio Tinto, BHP Group, Fortescue and Northern Star Resources roll the whole group's ground together.

Searching by company needs a free account. Colour by owner, company watchlists and company alerts are part of NextMaps Premium.

Open the map and turn on Colour by owner under Tenements. It is the quickest way to see who is really behind the ground you are looking at.