MORE than 30 years of faith in the Pilbara has finally started to pay off Western Australian mining industry journeyman Dennis O’Meara.
Mr O’Meara has been involved with several significant resource and exploration discoveries in WA over the years but it is Indee, a prospect about 70 kilometres south of Port Hedland that he first explored in the late 1960s, that has recently set the stock market alight.
Mr O’Meara founded De Grey Mining nearly two years ago by selling down and floating several of his WA tenements, including Indee.
He now owns about of 8 per cent of stock in the company which, after loitering around 12 cents since listing in July 2002, soared to a high of 70 cents at the end of 2003 on the back of a gold discovery in the Pilbara.
The December 8 discovery at Wingina Well, Indee sent De Grey’s price soaring from 16 cents to 38.5 cents – a 140 per cent rise for the day.
The rumour mill went into overdrive with talk of bigger miners expressing an interest in De Grey’s results.
While the market’s response surprised Mr O’Meara, at the time he said the gold results were the most significant he had ever seen.
“[There were] old results which were in our prospectus so it is not an accident that this has happened,” he said.
Mr O’Meara, who describes himself as “a bit dated” in the mining game, grew up in small WA mining towns.
He and his wife headed for the Pilbara in the late 1960s lured by the iron ore boom.
They lived there for more than 10 years running a mining supply shop as well as prospecting and contract pegging out of Port Hedland.
“It was the Kalgoorlie of the Pilbara,” Mr O’Meara said.
This initial hope, which first led Mr O’Meara to Port Hedland, has kept his aspirations alive for the region for more than 30 years.
He first pegged a series of exploration licences at Indee in 1969, which now boasts platinum, nickel and gold potential and forms a major part of De Grey’s tenement portfolio.
Despite later dropping the prospects three times due to either a lack of funds, lack of interest or poor metal prices, Mr O’Meara persistently returned to the tenements.
Big players such as WMC, Inco and CRA all had a sniff at some stage but they too moved on.
Over the next 30 years Mr O’Meara also made several other discoveries, two of which – Horan’s Dam (Kalgoorlie) and Beyondie (Great Sandy Desert) – now comprise a significant portion of De Grey’s portfolio.
However, results only started flowing for De Grey about two years ago.
“It was very tough. We worked on this for seven or eight years to get De Grey listed just out of our own hip pockets,” Mr O’Meara said.
He now declares the Indee to be the jewel in the crown of a province in the making.
“It is not just us. There are other companies adjacent to us finding significant gold including Melbourne-based Range River Gold and Tim Goyder’s Bullion Resources,” he said.
More positive gold results from Indee were announced recently.
However, Mr O’Meara is keen to dispel any rumours that have been circulating about De Grey’s future.
“Yes, we have had contact from other companies but only in the context of saying: ‘good work and we would love to see it some time’,” he said.
“We have had no formal situation whereupon another company is saying this is what [they] would like to be in there doing.
“De Grey wants to be a miner.
“We have been reasonably confident explorers and we are good prospectors. Combine the first two and we think shareholders will get a good run if the company becomes a miner.”
However, after many years in the mining industry, Mr O’Meara is also no stranger to the unpredictable nature of the mining game.
“There will always be disappointments in any exploration, you might not get the results but you just carry on with your work,” he said.
“All I can say is we have not deviated from our program, we will carry on with our work and we can’t control what other people are saying.”
Montagu Stockbrokers client adviser Ian Spence, who has been following De Grey closely since its debut on the stock market, said the company’s fame was warranted.
“De Grey has been a strange one. Twice oversubscribed on listing and then in June of that year the gold price fell away and they languished around 10 cents to 12 cents for a long time,” he said.
“Really they were just not recognised in the market.
“So I think it is a good example of good operators who have done the work and are finally getting the recognition.”
Despite the stock’s surge in price, Mr Spence said there was still more growth room.
“We have a lot of confidence in the management and the whole area [the Pilbara] is really starting to hit its straps,” he said.
“Undoubtedly there will be a lot more interest in the stock.
“You have exposure to gold and you still have exposure to a platinum play.”
“And that is without looking at the blue sky in Beyondie.”