research of the ravenswood area

You will have read about IIG's new find at Lionel Diggings where IIG expect to confirm abundant rich vein gold (samples up to 73.3g/t Au).

Located near the Ravenswood area, south of Townsville and not far from Charters Towers...(lat.) you can see the rain affecting the area on the Weather Radar for Townsville. (see link at end below.)

I came across the following on the net, regarding the history of the gold rush days in nearby Ravenswood - seems like it all got too difficult and complex for the simply equipped early day miners.

I expect it will be a totally different scenario and result using modern mining technology and extraction methods IIG mining engineers posess today.

Initial grab samples by IIG already show rich vein success - they will be looking to confirm these test samples and confirm abundance of the same.

Success seems just a short distance away . . . perhaps next month.(drilling to commence weather permitting)

So what is the history of gold mining in the area ???

Charters Towers is not too far away ... which also has a big history in gold.... but even closer to Lionel Diggings is....'Ravenswood'.

'Ravenswood' - Profile -

A once-prosperous gold mining boomtown now almost a ghost town.
Located 1459 km northwest of Brisbane and 89 km east of Charters Towers, Ravenswood was once a thriving gold mining town. Today it is almost a ghost town with a population of around 100 who service the surrounding area and cater for the growing tourism.

It is hard to imagine that this town once boasted over 50 pubs (of course many of them were nothing more than tents for selling booze) or that it once had a population of over 4000.

The area was settled in the 1860s by pastoralists who had pushed north looking for new lands. Along the Elphinstone and Connolly Creeks two properties were established. At the point where the Elphinstone met the Burdekin the Merri Merriwa station was established and further upstream was Ravenswood station which was almost certainly named after a town in Scotland which had been popularised by the well known nineteenth century novelist Sir Walter Scott in his novel The Bride of Lammermoor.

Gold was discovered in the area in 1868. A year later about 140 prospectors and fossickers had been attracted to the new fields. When three men, Jessop, Buchanan and Crane, found good alluvial gold near the present site of Ravenswood the news led to a gold rush.

After the initial flurry of fossicking the prospectors were confronted with the task of extracting the gold from lodes. This process involved blasting and crushing and quite complex chemical processing. In 1870 the Government built a crushing mill at Burnt Point and the results from the first batch of crushed ore were so good that they prompted a further rush on the area and the establishment of five more crushing works. The success of the mine was short lived. By 1872 it had become extremely difficult to extract the ore and many of the miners had moved on to Charters Towers. Some persistent miners stayed on extracting about 300 kg of gold each year from the area.

The continuing operation, plus the discovery of silver, led to the construction of a railway from Cunningham to Ravenswood.

By the early 1890s the mines were once again nearly idle. A mine manager, Archibald Lawrence Wilson, took up an option and managed to interest English investors in the field. So successful was Wilson in finding backers for the mines that it was during the period 1900-1912 that the town prospered and Wilson became known as 'the uncrowned king of Ravenswood'. During this period the population of the Ravenswood area reached about 5000 and there was about 12 500 kg of gold extracted.

This seems to me to be a very good backdrop to IIG's planned mining activities at Lionel Diggings . . . just 25kms away from the Ravenswood Gold Mine.

The weather link to see when the rain stops falling . .. .. is:

http://mirror.bom.gov.au/products/IDR213.loop.shtml?looping=0&reloaded=0&topography=true&locations=true&range=true#skip

I trust this little beauty surf up the waterfall of negative market sentiment and falling sharemarket prices.

Cheers
Gav