Highlights
Commenting on the sampling results, Managing Director Wade Johnson said:
“The recent field activities and assay results at our Christmas Gift prospect provide further support to the prospectivity of this new high-grade discovery within our large 14 Mile Well Project. We are excited by the further high-grade rock chip results and shallow surface activities that now demonstrates a strike length of at least 50m to the structure that is open. The geological characteristics of the Christmas Gift structure does provide key information and a target style to explore the greater Everleigh area for additional gold mineralisation and further develop the geological model in this area. A diamond drill rig is in the process of being secured, the drill sites prepared, and we are poised to commence our maiden drill program at Christmas Gift.”
Christmas Gift Prospect
Christmas Gift is located within the priority Everleigh Well Target area (“Everleigh”), that is central to the 14 Mile Well Project. The Everleigh area forms part of the historic Redcastle gold mining centre, renowned for its prolific gold nugget finds, which was discovered in 1894. Everleigh also contains a number of historical prospecting pits, shafts and shallow workings in additional numerous alluvial gold workings distributed over a wide area. The largest historical workings in this Everleigh area are the Castlemaine Gold workings location to the south of the Christmas Gift (see Figure 5). Alluvial gold nuggets continue to be found in the area.
The Christmas Gift Prospect is located at one of the historical workings and where sampling by the Company during 2023 confirmed the presence of the narrow high-grade quartz veinlets with abundant visible gold (ASX release 8 June 2023).
Further exploration work by the Company consisted of extending the original sample pit previously exposed (ASX release 8 June 2024) and excavation of five shallow sample pits (costeans) along strike to expose the Christmas Gift shear beneath the shallow (0.5m) cover. This work has demonstrated the shear now extends to approximately 50m along strike and is open. In addition, the shear structure maintains a consistent 1m true width which trends approximately northwest and dips 55 degrees to the northeast (Figure 4).
The original trench (ASX release 8 May 2024) was also extended to the south, toward and adjacent to the historical shaft. This work further exposed the gold bearing lithological unit (shear) and exposed additional spectacular narrow quartz veinlets containing visible gold (Figure 1 & Table 1) that has provided additional important geological information to the characteristics of the gold bearing structure. The Christmas Gift shear is interpreted to be a sheared interflow sediment -basalt contact bounded by massive basalt.
The combination of the previous and recent work by the Company has now confirmed the Christmas Gift shear has a strike length of at least 50m, is open, maintains a width of approximately 1m and has further enhanced the prospectivity of the target.
Results from multiple rock chip samples (Appendix 1) collected from the sample pits to test the different lithologies, including the quartz veinlets within the main Christmas Gift shear zone and the surrounding massive basalt host, support the high-grade character of the structure. Significant high-grade gold results (Table 1) include 158g/t Au and 93.5g/t Au returned from rock samples (including quartz veining collected from the shear).
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