Ann: Corporate Presentation - 121 APAC Conference - March 2021, page-55

The watermelon seed gold rush was a bit of a rort.

This is not a rort.

But the watermelon seed shaped gold nuggets are real: they are alluvial gold deposits, of no great size or significance, sitting in the conglomerate beds just under the Archaean Mount Roe basalt. These conglomerates are old valley-filling river gravels, subsequently buried by the earliest Mt Roe volcanics basalt flows, which flowed down the same valleys and then filled them up, as lava flows do. The soft gold nuggets in the underlying conglomerates, which were originally round, were then squashed flat and stretched out under compaction, by the weight of the overlying rock layers. No mystery there. They are just like the far richer alluvial gold nugget accumulations in the Victorian Deep Leads, which extend out under the basalt lava flows of the Otway Basin, except that those are 8M to 10M years old, whereas the Pilbara ones are 2,700M years old and so a bit harder to trace downstream and explore. The only mystery is why anybody ever got so excited about it.

The Paterson Province on the other hand is home to multiple 10Moz plus gold deposits, with not just one but two within walking distance of Antipa's ground. And where there are two, there may be three..

"Ooh said good fings always come in frees..?" Ian Dury - Plaistow Patricia (New boots and panties) With Lyrics! - YouTube

(Our musical taste betrays our age.. )