And the soil sampling sounds like a stop gap to meet tenement...

And the soil sampling sounds like a stop gap to meet tenement expenditure.

One of the joyous things about soil sampling around Charters Towers is that the bitumen roads are made of crushed mullock from Charters Towers (that's where the historic mullock dumps went, folks) and every road between Charlie's Trousers and Mt Isa has a whacking great gold (and copper and arsenic and silver and bismuth and the rest of the periodic table) in soil anomaly associated with it. On both sides of the road.

Making it even more fun, the basal units of the Campaspe Beds are a coarse fluvial sandstone that's also chock full of gold. So your gold in soil map not only lights up with some wonderful anomalies around roads and their drainages, it is supported by some even more wonderful anomalies wherever there's soil derived from the Campaspe Beds, which is most of it.

I expect to see several years of tail chasing coming out of this little exercise.