Answered my own questions here by going back into the QLD Minocc and digging up the few reports from previous explorers at Prince of Wales. Not much exploration has gone on at all Billiton did a bit of work in 1986 and noted that Occidental Minerals had been there in the 1960s or maybe 1970s? Anyway the Billiton report notes Ironstone hosted magnetite sulfides at the Prince of Wales mines and they got surface samples of up tp 1.84% Cu and over 5g/T Au from rock chip sampling, they did a Sirotem survey but then proceeded to drill a few holes west of the old workings drilling towards the east, despite their own geology maps telling them that the stratigraphy dipped vertically, or possibly steeply towards the east other holes drilled towards the west were in areas with rocks dipping to the west in what appears to be fairly tightly folded complex geology. Billiton did get a drill hole with what looks like 10-12m of 0.5-0.9% Cu and corresponding 0.3-0.5g/T Au samples but they were not considered "economic" at the time. Now of course - everyone in the industry knows that those sort of results are often the precursor or "near miss" drill holes with tenors of grade similar to that immediately adjacent to some of the better historic discovery holes at Osborne, Selwyn Starra and Ernest Henry. Here is the Billiton mapping and note the poor drill coverage and placement of drill holes, note that the round circles with numbers in them are not drill holes but are geological and alteration notes to the mapping.
Sons of Gwalia picked up the ground in 1991 and essentially re-invented the wheel, and proved that the best soil and rock chip geochemistry was (surprise surprise
) located at the Prince of Wales workings which to their shock and surprise contained ironstone magnetite hosted rocks. Then they gave up and tried to farm out the ground, without drilling a hole, despite all the emerging evidence in the late 1980s and early 1990s that ironstone hosted copper gold deposits were being discovered all around them at Selwyn, at Trough Tank/Obsorne and at Ernest Henry.
You see this so many times with companies doing detailed stream sediments, soil sampling, rock chip sampling and detailed laborious mapping and then casually drilling the wrong way, or not at all, and walking away. Given the historical track record of Billiton in minerals and Sons of Gwalia in everything, I would consider that the Prince of Wales workings are essentially untouched by
competent explorers.
