And good evening to you Paperbark. And thank you for a very...

And good evening to you Paperbark. And thank you for a very wonderful post. You certainly took me back a few decades, very memorable ones at that. You also knocked me back with a picture of that excellent Gaspeite specimen. You have preserved it well. More on that later.

It is good to know that you have had the good fortune to be working with the early Australian Doyens in the nickel industry I unfortunately left Western Mining in Kalgoorlie to join BHP before the nickel boom. I shouldn’t say unfortunately because BHP at the time also had some excellent geoscientists and I was privileged to learn much from them. Yes, it was a great era.

Aggressive nickel exploration was new to Australia at the time and Kambalda in particular went a long way to keep the Kalgoorlie region alive as the gold mines were only surviving because of government subsidies. Then other major nickel deposits were discovered over the years on the Yilgarn and now it appears that St. George Mining may be on the verge of discovering a new province in the Cathedrals Corridor structure. There certainly is a lot of faulting which could have tapped large volumes of ultramafics.

Yes Paperbark, it would be nice to replicate some of the rich minerals that enrich these orebodies in the secondary or transition zones below the gossans, a la the Chalcocite blankets of say Mt. Isa. Not as pretty as the secondary minerals of nickel perhaps, but very rich nonetheless. As for the strike extension of SGQ’s structure, you are very correct. Like you, it would not surprise me at all if a couple of these prospects on the structure throw up some phenomenal deposits. So no, you are not dreaming. And with the shallow intersections to date, is it possible that a combination of intrusive ultramafics as well as extrusive lavas, now buried, with as you say some Komatiites cutting through these formations like hot knives through butter were at play during the history of deposition?

There is much petrology, decent detailed mapping and serious core logging to be done before we understand the nature of this geological setting and its mineralisation emplacement.

Thank you again PB for taking the time to put your kind comments in your post and for taking me down memory lane.

Keep well and let us celebrate with the future success of SGQ.

Cheers

Helmenesh.