The Pilbara mining region in Western Australia has gone a full year without a fatality for the first time in nearly a century.

The year has not been incident-free however, The Department of Mines and Petroleum says there were 171 serious injuries in the same period.

Simon Ridge from the Department of Mines says more than 100 serious injuries were a result of manual handling or over-exertion when shifting objects; "People under-estimate the impact of the soft tissue injuries and some can have very long latencies on them as well," he said, "we've all heard about the guy with the bad back... repeating these injuries can actually result in some significant suffering and pain for people."

The last death in Australia’s most prominent mining area happened in August 2011, it had been the third in an eight month period.

"It's a great achievement, the industry should be applauded for that, but let’s look forward and make sure that we've got the right procedures, the right training, the right practices and the right supervision so that we can continue in that vein," Mr Ridge said, “you might even say that we were a little bit lucky because we're still having some very serious accidents and incidents."