By:Jesse RiseboroughWednesday, May 18, 2005JUNIOR gold explorer...

By:Jesse Riseborough
Wednesday, May 18, 2005

JUNIOR gold explorer Malachite Resources claims to have made a significant greenfields gold discovery at its Tooloom gold project in northeastern New South Wales.

According to Malachite, a recently completed program of RC drilling at the Phoenix prospect confirmed the presence of a mineralised zone 20-35m wide and 250-300m long and open at depth. Average grades within the zone were said to be in the range of 1.5-2 grams per tonne and increasing at depth, with individual assays returning up to 16.5gpt and 4.82% antimony.

Managing director Garry Lowder was excited with Phoenix, claiming the discovery disproved the popular notion that very few ore bodies in Australia remain undiscovered.

"I keep hearing that all the outcropping ore bodies in Australia have been discovered and that the junior resource companies have lost their ability to find something new. Phoenix is shaping up to be a major new, grass roots discovery, made by a junior resources company in an area that no-one else has explored," Lowder said in a market statement.

Malachite said the best mineralisation is hosted within a breccia pipe, part of a much larger auriferous system containing a billion tonnes of sulphide-bearing rock with all drill holes into this system returning anomalous gold values.

"We believe that the best gold grades within the Phoenix system are to be found in favourable structural traps, such as the breccia pipe we have just drilled. The breccia pipe alone is big enough to contain a resource of half a million ounces of gold if grades like those obtained to date continue to greater depth," Lowder said.

Malachite said the next phase of drilling at Phoenix would focus on the breccia pipe as it attempts to define the resource body.

Shares in Malachite were trading up 16.7% in morning trade at 14c.