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Coolgardie gold miner now has its Treasure Island

The company at the vanguard of rebuilding gold in one of Australia's most historic gold camps, Focus Minerals appears to have a potential second mining area and has given it the imaginative name of Treasure Island.

Author: Ross Louthean
Posted: Monday , 01 Nov 2010

Focus Minerals (ASX:FML) announced today some high grade rock chip samples from the eastern side of an island on the massive Lake Cowan salt pan, well south of its gold mining operations in Coolgardie.

The rock chip samples from the eastern side of "Treasure Island" included grades of 55.3 grams/tonne, 45.7 g/t and 38.4 g/t gold. They came from quartz veins up to 300 metres long with "the array of veins spanning an overall width of 20m."

The results, Focus said, highlight strong potential for a significant outcropping high-grade gold resource.

The high-grade gold samples containing fine visible gold have been recovered from several key locations in the southern and eastern portions of the Island. Treasure Island is part of the Lake Cowan Project, 35km south-south east along strike from the major gold camp of Kambalda-St Ives.

Focus' chief executive Campbell Baird said the sampling began early in September as part of a major geological mapping initiative to unlock the controls to gold and copper mineralisation found in the area.

An aeromagnetic survey was flown across the tenement package and this was being analysed with results expected late in the current Quarter.

The mapping program has been focussed on Treasure Island where up to 80 rock chip samples have been collected to date with better results including 55.3g/t, 45.7g/t, 38.4g/t, 22.8g/t, 16.4g/t, 15.3g/t and 9.4g/t (see Figure 1 and Table 1).

He said the main vein in places approaches 4-5m in thickness with the whole array approaching 20m.

"Surprisingly the veins appear totally untouched by old-timer workings," he said.

Lake Cowan is about 110 km sou-sou east of Kalgoorlie and the region has been the subject of nickel and gold exploration over the past two decades and previous explorers elsewhere have established medium tonnages of low to medium grade gold which, with the gold price at the time, did not attract sustained attention.

Focus has been steadily building up gold production as the mainstay of gold mining in Coolgardie, which was the catalyst for the first Western Australian gold rush in the late 1890s and played a key role in colonising that then foundling State.

In 2009-10 Focus produced more than 62,000 ounces of gold as it progressively built up operations and in that year recorded an after-tax profit of $A10.9 million ($US10.79 M).

However, unlike a lot of other emerging Australian gold producers, Focus is still a penny stock at around A5 cents. The prime reason for this is that it has more than 2.86 billion listed shares - partly a legacy of marrying junior companies that began in the late 1990s.