Ann: Corporate Presentation - 121 APAC Conference - March 2021, page-13

Hi Salpetie,

I completely concur with your comments re the unpredictability of gold grades from visual observations of drill core, drill chips, etc. The best you can ever say is that we are in the zone, on the structure, have seen the characteristic mineral assemblages, etc. And the minute you start playing 'guess the grade' you get confounded, for all the reasons you have mentioned:

Assay one half of the core, 20m along strike from the high grade underground orebody, and you get 0.5 g/t and a big blast from your brokers. Go back and put the other half in for a check assay and you get 150g/t and suddenly you are a hero again.

Drill out the near-surface mineralised contact, where you got 20m at 6g/t 200m further north, only to find yourself salivating because you've gone through 15m of quartz veining exactly where you expected to find it, and then you get the assays back only to find that the whole lot goes less than half a gram!

So woe betide anyone who thinks they might buy the company's shares on the basis of visual observations. Shroedinger's cat will get you every time. The very act of buying shares will fix the outcome that the sample was never significantly gold mineralised.

And as for recording visible gold on your drill logs, you very quickly learn to keep that to yourself until you get the actual assay results back.

And no, nothing about XRF detection of gold grade has advanced that I am aware of. It remains a low grade bulk property of the rock, not a surface characteristic. The only thing I know that's harder to call visually than gold grade is diamond grade, where you need to take a 400t sample, and a couple of scruffy little laterite coated granules the size of half a lentil can make all the difference between ore and waste.

The only thing that can be useful is a dolly pot and a gold pan, if you've got the time, the patience and can spare enough sample to hand crush and pan off a reasonable amount of core, drill chips, outcrop, soil or whatever.

Re the resource upgrade, I wonder if Rio actually will estimate and issue a revised resource figure at this stage. Or whether having satisfied themselves that there is enough additional mineralisation to justify further work they will simply keep on drilling, and do the revised estimation later in the year?

They already seem to have made their internal decision to take it to the next stage, so why add to the delay and expense? Though presumably it is an ongoing and incremental process to some extent, and there are internal reporting requirements, which must be shared with the more share-price sensitive minor partner.

With regards,

Onceover.