The rods are expected to start turning shortly at Anglo Australian’s Koongie Park gold project near Halls Creek in the Kimberley region of WA after it received native title clearances for drilling and related exploration field activities.
The company’s ground holdings are considered very prospective for gold and cover a 30km section of the Nicolsons Shear Zone, which also hosts Pantoro Limited’s operating Nicolsons underground mine, which reported a total resource of 1.5 million tonnes grading 8.3g/t gold for 393,000 ounces in May last year.
The area already has some pedigree, with Anglo turning up high grade rock chip samples of 73.58g/t gold at the Bulldog prospect and 15.7g/t gold at the Nicolsons East prospect during fieldwork in 2017.
Despite the gold endowment of the general region, only 6 historical drill holes have been completed at the Bulldog prospect to date and numerous lookalike Nicolsons-type gold targets exist along the same structural corridor.
The company has planned a maiden 15-hole, 1000m RC drilling program at its Nicolsons East shear zone targets and will commence this work once weather conditions permit.
Anglo Australian Chairman John Jones said: “With geology at surface considered to be essentially the same as that encountered by Pantoro at its Nicolsons Project, we consider it highly likely that there is considerable gold mineralisation to be identified at Koongie Park on Anglo Australian ground just as is enjoyed by Pantoro on its ground.”
“Moreover, with some significant gold identified from rock chips at surface – at Bulldog, for instance which has assayed up to 73.58 g/t Au – who knows what mineralisation awaits discovery.”
“Now that we are able to move forward with drilling and other exploration activities, Koongie Park will thus become an active project for the company, along with both our exciting Feysville and Mandilla projects.”
The company holds nearly 550 square kilometres of exploration tenements at the Koongie gold project, where the historical focus has been on base metals exploration and very limited focus on gold.
This is somewhat surprising, given that the Halls Creek area was the site of WA’s first gold rush starting in 1885.
The geological province surrounding this part of the Kimberley district has many similarities with nearby Granites-Tanami province in the Northern Territory, which is strongly mineralised with gold, including Newmont’s world-class Callie deposit and surrounding mines that hold over 20 million ounces.
During Anglo’s 2017 field work geological reconnaissance and sampling program, the company successfully located gold mineralisation in quartz veining over a strike length of 1.7km at Nicolsons East and generated new exploration targets at Bulldog.
The upcoming drill program will specifically target structures beneath the mapped quartz veins at Nicolsons East and Bulldog, with the aim of testing the scale, extent and grade of the prospective looking geology at those prospects.
By Matt Birney
