Drilling kicks off at Great Southern WA Duketon gold project

Great Southern Mining has kicked off a reverse circulation drilling campaign at its Duketon gold project, which spans 178 square kilometres within 13 virtually contiguous leases in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields. 

The program has been designed to unlock the full potential of its promising Golden Boulder prospect which previously produced some impressive results before the rig is moved onto several other high-priority 

The company completed a share placement before Christmas to raise $2.4 million in fresh equity that will assist with the campaign, with directors sending out a positive message by stumping up $152,000 of their own money.

Previous drilling at Golden Boulder included 4m grading 5.64 grams per tonne (g/t) gold, featuring a standout 2m running at 9.89 g/t gold. Another 3m hit came in at 4.80 g/t gold, including a 1m section at 12.45 g/t gold and a 4m hit graded 6.8 g/t gold within an 8m intercept of 3.9g/t gold. 

The new campaign will target the Main and East mineralised trends to build on a 1.4-kilometre strike length that was first unearthed in the 2024 campaign.

Great Southern Mining managing director Matthew Keane said: “Golden Boulder is one of GSN’s top-ranking prospects in the Duketon project. Golden Boulder hosts three mineralised trends and, prior to the company’s first campaign in 2021, it had seen minimal drilling since the 1990s. We are keen to execute a high-impact and cost-effective program.” 

Historical workings at site from 1900 to 1955 produced nearly 1,800 ounces of gold at an impressive average grade of 28.6 g/t gold. Despite its rich past, however, much of the area has remained underexplored, with many of the drill holes not going deeper than 40m.

Golden Boulder is in an up-market geological address on the well-known north-south trending Duketon Greenstone Belt which is host to Regis Resources’ 8-million-ounce Garden Well project slightly to the north. 

It is also close to Regis’ neighbouring gold deposits at Rosemont where it is sitting on more than 2 million gold ounces and its Ben Hur deposit with 390,000 ounces of gold. 

Adding to the prospectivity of Great Southern’s grounds, the massive Gold Fields-owned Granny Smith gold mine sits just 40km to the south and the Ashanti gold-owned Sunrise Dam gold operations are just a little further south again. 

These two operations alone have been responsible for more than 10 million ounces of gold production and potentially provide a strategic opportunity for Great Southern. 

Should the company make a discovery, it may be able to initially toll treat its ore at one of the massive mines to generate some early revenue.

Separate to its ambitions to develop a gold mine in Western Australia, Great Southern recently jumped into bed with joint venture partner, Gold Fields Ltd to explore for big porphyry gold-copper systems at its massive Edinburgh Park Project in Queensland. 

A recent induced polarisation (IP) survey conducted by the mega miner unearthed a huge, 2km-wide geophysical anomaly, which it believes has the potential to host a large-scale intrusive related gold-copper and/or an epithermal gold deposit.

Geochemical sampling over the interpreted anomaly stretches across 4kms by 1km and has kicked up high concentrations of gold, silver, copper and particularly molybdenum, a typical marker of a porphyry deposit.

Evidence of outcropping rocks rich in sulphides above the anomaly from previous field mapping has only added to the excitement given sulphides can be a strong indicator of nearby mineralisation. 

With a drill rig now on site at Duketon and Gold Fields pushing on with helicopter-borne IP, aeromagnetic surveys and on-ground mapping at Edinburgh Park, Great Southern is not likely to be short of potentially interesting news flow in the coming months.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au