A gold exploration company believe the Clonbinane area has potential to yield significant amounts of gold and antimony after ‘encouraging’ drilling results in the area.
Southern Cross Gold’s Sunday Creek exploration project encompasses State Government-issued resource licenses EL 7232, EL 6163 and RL 6040, covering about 19,365 hectares of land from a few kilometres south of Broadford to near Flowerdale in the east.
Southern Cross Gold chief executive Mike Hudson said while the area had a ‘long-forgotten mining history dating back to the 1850s’, the company believed it still had untapped potential.
According to Southern Cross Gold, the area was previously explored by several companies and one private explorer nearly 30 years ago, and while drilling results from the 1990s and early 2000s had been positive, present prices for gold and antimony made a potential operation in the region more viable.
Mr Hudson said the Sunday Creek region was different to many of Victoria’s traditional gold mining areas including Bendigo and Ballarat, where gold deposits date from the Ordovician geological period of about 400 million years ago.
“Whereas at Sunday Creek the origin of the gold and antimony is from the much younger Devonian period of geological history about seventy million years later,” he said.
“It’s what we call an epizonal gold style, which is quite new in Victoria’s commercial gold history.
Mr Hudson said the Fosterville mine near Bendigo was also an epizonal gold project and had in recent years been the highest-grade gold deposit in the world.
He said epizonal gold projects had been largely unrecognised by geologists and explorers as a potential source of new gold and antimony.
“We are drilling beneath the few old mine sites and at a much greater depth and coming up with some surprisingly good results” he said.
Mr Hudson said the gold values discovered in the region were ‘good enough to excite any gold explorer’, while the antimony, considered a nuisance by past explorers was now highly valued as a critical metal.
Antimony is used in metal alloying, creating electric vehicle and grid storage batteries, in semi-conductors, in defence and in industry for its fire-retardant properties.
Mr Hudson said Southern Cross Gold currently had three diamond drilling rigs operating across the Sunday Creek site and intended to add two more portable drilling rigs to its exploration efforts.
He said it would undertake district-wide exploration with geophysics, exploration mapping and light detection and ranging surveys targeting old mining sites.
People can find out more about the project by visiting www.southerncrossgold.com.au/projects/sunday-creek.