Thanks Hottin. Great interview. Alex's macro thoughts about gold...

Thanks Hottin. Great interview. Alex's macro thoughts about gold and how he went about building Barton from scratch are fascinating.

Further to your earlier observation about potential for a discovery, Alex's comments from 21 minutes about Tarcoola are very interesting.

I've transcribed it, for the record. Apologies for the length. Was more than I thought when I started!

Tarcoola is an historical gold field. This is where South Australia had its high-grade gold rush in 1893. What's interesting is what's in this gold field. It's about 15kms long and we own a mine in the middle of it. Across this gold field there are about 600 high-grade mining, small pits, adits and shafts where people were mining 30-40-50 grams per tonne. That small open pit that's there now, the one we own, that was dug in 2016-2018.

But across this 130-year arc of high-grade gold production, nobody did a modern contemporary interpretation of what are the structures that brought all this gold to surface and where is it really coming from and which of these structures are the best ones to start focusing around.

So while we were building up Tunkillia, we actually did about three years of work to build a new sub-surface architectural model. We published that in 2023, about a year and half ago now, and this gave us essentially...we mapped out about 15 different structures that were parallel and cross-cutting to the one that contains the high-grade pit that we have.

Then we went and drill-tested five or six of these and we found high-grade gold everywhere. But one project in particular named Tolmer stood out. This was actually our favourite target. What we discovered was the gold (sum?). Then we started drilling and expanded that, and then we went back and re-tested the gold to say, are there other geochemical elements that we can use to predict continuity and use for exploration. What we found was, where we had expected there to be some silver, which you find throughout the gold field, there's actually very high-grade silver. So we had silver grades of 50, 60, 100, 200, 300grams per tonne in conjunction with gold up to 80gm/t.

So this took on kind of a new flavour. And then we stepped off and drilled a subsidiary target about 1km to the west. This has essentially become what we are now calling the western silver zone because our first drill hole drilled one intersection of 6 metres @ 4,700gm/t from 46 metres depth. So that's a 28,000gm/metre intercept which was the 4th highest in the world on the ASX and TSX in the4 first quarter. So very, very high-grade silver. That definitely got people's attention. We put some more drilling into it, we came up with 5,000, 6,000 gm/metre intersections. So we've had multiple silver intersections that have continuously ranked in the top 10 on the ASX, TSX and London Stock Exchange.

The funny thing about this, or the odd thing about this is, we have a perfectly 2-dimnesional understanding of this now because all of these holes are in one line. So we have depth, width and maybe 15cms of geological knowledge here. So what is it? It's very exciting.

We are about to expedite a bunch of drilling to start drilling further to the west because this is getting thicker and thicker, and high-grade is continuing to the west. Bbut we're also going to go north and south and give this thing a third dimension and work out what it is.

But it looks like it's a high-grade silver oxide body of mineralisation that may overlay something that we hope is much, much more interesting in terms of being a large-scale gold-silver system underneath.