I see a few posts occasionally where people are asking about whether a track is a defined road, or just a track, or a station road - or something else.
The W.A. Dept of Regional Development and Lands has produced a good brochure, explaining how W.A. roads are defined, gazetted, proclaimed, legislated, or created.
As always, there's no simple explanation, and no simple answer to the "road" question - but the brochure goes some way towards explaining the terribly-convoluted process of defining a road.
Part of the problem of course, is the large number of Govt Depts and bodies, and other Govt authorities, who have input into road creation, road use, and road repair and maintenance.
It may surprise some people that virtually all station roads in W.A. (i.e. those on pastoral leases) - apart from gazetted, proclaimed and named roads - are private roads belonging to the station lessee, and permission to use those roads is normally expected, from those wishing to use those roads.
After all, the station lessee is normally the one responsible for maintaining those roads, and they are normally put in place and used for station purposes.
A rather interesting point I found out recently, is the fact that 92% of W.A. is still Crown Land - meaning that freehold land (including Aboriginal Lands) still only makes up a relatively small area of the State.
As a general rule of thumb, the surveyed "road reserve" for the majority of the older surveyed roads in W.A. is the old "1 chain" (20M approx). In the 1930's, many road surveys moved to 2 chain roads (40M approx).
Major roads in the earlier surveys were often 2 chain roads - and in some of the newer developed wheatbelt areas, you will quite often find 5 chain and 10 chain road
reserves.
These wider road
reserves were surveyed with the aim of leaving substantial amounts of roadside vegetation to preserve the original native habitat, as it was realised by the early 1960's, that the narrower road
reserves, along with overclearing of farmland, was decimating the native habitat.
Here's the link to the brochure -
W.A. - Creation of a Road
Cheers, Ron.