Cortona floated in 2006 off the the back of consolidating the...

Cortona floated in 2006 off the the back of consolidating the North monger, Wombola project.They upgraded the resources to the current numbers. In the Sept/2008 quarterly Cortona announced an offtake agreement with Barrick subject to a 6month due diligence period to mine, haul, and treat Wombolas gold "current" resources.They withdrew in March of 2009. The project has been has been for sale since then. Prior to Cortona the open pit was abandoned in the late 80's because those narrow enechelon stockwork zones are really narrow making open pit mining without significant dilution nie on impossible. In addition a stockwork quartz veining system generally refers to ore zones where the veins are too thin and too closely spaced to be worked individually. This makes modelling and grade control extremely difficult because it is so unpredictable. The Mt Monger sytems are narrow but boy are they predictable. Perilya tried to mine it using the wrong mining method because they had no experience in gold mining, not surprising that SLR changed to narrow vein mining, any gold mining company in the goldfields would have done the same thing. They recognized the opportunity and good on them they acted on it. There is no doubt that the Wombola package is a good exploration play for Au, but I wouldn't be expecting SLR to be open pitting Wombola resources in the near future.