Cambrian greenstone belts in Victoria: Marginal sea-crust slices in the Lachlan Fold Belt of southeastern Australia

The oldest rocks in the mainland southeastern Australian segment of the (Palaeozoic) Lachlan Fold Belt are Cambrian greenstones which outcrop in three narrow linear belts separated by Lower Palaeozoic marine troughs in which many thousands of meters of predominantly greywacke-shale sediments accumulated. The greenstone belt nearest the Australian craton, the Mt. Stavely Greenstone Belt, is composed of calc-alkalic meta-andesites, metadacites and intermediate and acid pyroclastics. The Heathcote Greenstone Belt, of central Victoria, consists of three segments; the northern and southern segments are very similar and their internal stratigraphy, petrology, and geochemistry suggest they represent an incomplete, disrupted ophiolite. However, the central segment of the Heathcote Greenstone Belt, which is more intensely deformed and metamorphosed than the northern and southern segments, is composed of a calc-alkalic volcanic suite dominated by meta-andesites. The Mt. Wellington Greenstone Belt of eastern Victoria shows remarkable overall similarities to the northern segment of the Heathcote Greenstone Belt and evidence, including the presence of fault slices of gabbro and peridotites, suggests that this belt too is a much disrupted ophiolite. We interpret the ophiolites to have been the crust of a marginal sea which developed by rifting of thin continental-type crust at the leading edge of a palaeo-Australian plate in the early Cambrian. Meta-andesites and associated rocks of the Mt. Stavely Greenstone Belt were probably erupted onto this thin continental crust above a Benioff zone, and a rifted-off fragment of this thin continental crust bearing a cover of calc-alkalic volcanic rocks has been preserved as the central segment of the Heathcote Greenstone Belt during later deformation events.