Gold rush on again in Victoria
By John Kennedy
Draw a line east to west across central Victoria just north of Bendigo and you can pretty much determine where the structures that host the state’s most productive historic goldfields plunge and disappear under the soil cover of the Murray Basin.
Last year Goldfields Australasia, subsidiary of the Goldfields (South Africa) group, is known to have obtained tantalising and encouraging results at Lockington between Bendigo and Echuca on the River Murray.
On their 100% owned Lockington exploration licence, Goldfields was said to have located a “mineralised horizon” in two holes within a 3km long gold in bedrock anomaly.
No grades were made public at the time but one intersection is believed to have been 3m at 2.85g/t gold.
The “discovery” is thought to relate to the Fosterville Fault, the structure that hosts the Perseverance gold mine 34km to the south of the discovery location.
Goldfields was intending to gear up a major regional exploration program in the final quarter of 2005 with the expectation that results from an air core drilling program would be available by early in 2006.
The exploration area between the Lockington discovery and the Fosterville mine site is held by Pacrim Energy, which also has a JV with Goldfields on this tenement and another to the east of the Fosterville mine site towards Heathcote.
Pacrim’s CEO Robert Foster tells Aus tralian Mining that Pacrim has been excited with the gold potential of this area of central Victoria “for about 10 years” and holds exploration licences totalling about 2000km2, most of which is joint ventured to Goldfields for them to earn a 75% interest.
Foster says he can add little to the information vacuum about the Goldfields activity except he thinks the air core drilling on Goldfields’ own ground and that of Goldfields/Pacrim is behind schedule and it may be further into 2006 before more news is available.
Pacrim has previously reported that over 10km strike length of the Fosterville trend passes though the Pacrim JV ground and continues on into Goldfields’ own ground.
Meanwhile, another central Victoria area likely to attract attention this year is immediately north of the Bendigo goldfield.
Two companies hold significant exploration licences here.
Stellar Resources selected its ground, which it calls North Bendigo on the basis of an original BHP Falcon survey. Although Stellar highly regards its holding, little work has been done to date largely because of the shortage of suitable air core drilling rigs.
Alexander Resources also holds a prominent area to the west of Stellar that takes in the former Sebastian goldfield and the previous Frederick the Great mine.
A couple of recent drill holes completed by Alexander to follow up on older drilling done by Western Mining have given some moderate gold values and a lot of structural information.
Alexander, which holds other strong ground positions south of Bendigo including most of the Chewton-Castlemaine goldfield and Tarnagulla west of Bendigo, recently topped up its working capital by about $3m in a new share issue and placement.
1 March 2006
AXD
alexander resources limited
