In Australia, I'm pretty sure mineral maps are what's funding Geoscience Australia, which is pretty much the reason we have digital maps at all. As for data be

In Australia, I'm pretty sure mineral maps are what's funding Geoscience Australia, which is pretty much the reason we have digital maps at all. As for data being "locked away" in formats, well, no one's really come up with the One True Geospatial format, so you've got TAB and SHP. I prefer TAB, because I hate column name limitations. Use QGIS [1] or GDAL [2] to get the data into a format you want, or for really heavy lifting, apply for a home use licence for FME Desktop [3] (which uses GDAL among other things). TL;DR: Mineral maps are worth cash money, and that's why you can't get at them. 1: https://qgis.org/en/site/ https://qgis.org/en/site/ - can a benevolent billionaire please throw a couple of million dollars at this thing? 2: https://www.gdal.org/ https://www.gdal.org/ - GDAL makes the world go round (or ellipsoid, depending on projection) 3: https://www.safe.com/free-fme-licenses/home-use/ https://www.safe.com/free-fme-licenses/home-use/