Ann: Tropicana Gold Mine Royalty Claim, page-40

Yeah, I agree. It seems reasonably obvious to me looking at the reports and presentations from the early-JV days that Independence Gold/Group made a conscious effort to separate/distinguish between the Tropicana West 100% and Tropicana East JV areas, and clearly stated that the former was subject to the WMC royalty, and the latter was not (at least in their view).
How they arrived at that conclusion, is again an unknown…all it shows from the outside looking in… is that those involved were at least aware of the WMC royalty, which as you say with the founding MD and others linking back to Southstar and previously WMC its no real surprise.

E 39/497 is the old WMC EL permit that was dropped in January 1999, the reporting was done under the combined ‘Pleiades Lakes Project’. The annual and surrender reports for these tenements AND the associated data is available through GeoDocs*.
*I guess the caveat to this being, just because the data is publicly available through DMP now, doesn’t mean it necessarily was publicly available in the years following the licence surrender...it might have been, I don’t know that’s all.
But certainly by the time JORC 2012 came into effect, the narrative in the AngloGold announcements was to make mention that the historical data was available in the public domain.

The figure below highlights the extent of the WMC Pleiades Lakes project, overlain is the current Tropicana mining lease and a rough outline of the open-pits:


These are the links to the WMC exploration reports leading up to dropping the ground (not sure it will post direct links, but should be able to copy paste)
https://geodocs.dmirs.wa.gov.au/Web/documentlist/10/Report_Ref/A56210
https://geodocs.dmirs.wa.gov.au/Web/documentlist/10/Report_Ref/A53953
https://geodocs.dmirs.wa.gov.au/Web/documentlist/10/Report_Ref/A50820

Anyway, they certainly tried a variety of geochemical sampling techniques with stream sediments, mag-lag, bulk soils, and a variety of different fractions, just as an example below.


Here is the plan view of the gold in soil anomaly, again overlain by the current Tropo mining lease and rough pit outline:


here is just a quick look at a couple of the soil datasets that are available, plotting gold (ppb);


This section in the WMC annual report is telling:

Confirms that apart from exploring the ground for magmatic Ni-Cu, they were also following up previous WMC diamond group samples that identified anomalous gold and silver.
So I take that to mean the geochem data collected by WMC during this ~3 year period before then surrendering the ground is not part of the “WMC Diamond Division Database”
So that still means without knowing exactly where these “WMC Diamond Division Database” samples are spatially located its difficult to say how influencial they were in any of Independence Group decision making. But at least based on the above, there is a variety of geochem out in the public domain that highlights gold anomalism (at least imo).