Boyanup is a town located on the South Western Highway

South Western Highway

South Western Highway is a highway in the South West region of Western Australia connecting Perth's southeast with Walpole. It is a part of the National Highway 1 network for most of its length...

 in the South West agricultural region, 195 km south of Perth

Perth, Western Australia

Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....

 and 18 km south-east of Bunbury

Bunbury, Western Australia

The port city of Bunbury is the third largest city in Western Australia after the State Capital Perth and Mandurah. It is situated south of Perth's central business district...

, Western Australia

Western Australia

Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...

.

Boyanup is an Noongar

Noongar

The Noongar are an indigenous Australian people who live in the south-west corner of Western Australia from Geraldton on the west coast to Esperance on the south coast...

 Aboriginal

Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....

 name, said to mean "a place of quartz

Quartz

Quartz is the second-most-abundant mineral in the Earth's continental crust, after feldspar. It is made up of a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall formula SiO2. There are many different varieties of quartz,...

" as "Boya" means "rock" or "stone". The name was first recorded by an explorer in 1852, and a road survey in 1869 shows the town name as "Boyinup". In 1888 a railway was built between Boyanup and Bunbury, and the townsite was gazetted in 1894.

The town is located on the shores of the Preston River and the first European in the area was Captain Bunbury who visited the area in the 1880s and thought it to be ideal for farming.

The Yoganup North Mine site, owned and operated by Iluka Resources

Iluka Resources

Iluka Resources is a mining company involved in the mining and processing of titanium based and zircon products. The company mines heavy mineral sands and separates the concentrate into its individual mineral constituents rutile, ilmenite, leucoxene and zircon...

, where mineral sands

Heavy mineral sands ore deposits

Heavy mineral sands are a class of ore deposit which is an important source of zirconium, titanium, thorium, tungsten, rare earth elements, the industrial minerals diamond, sapphire, garnet, and occasionally precious metals or gemstones....

are mined and separated, is located 5.1 kilometres (3 mi) north-west of the town.