Brightstar drilling lands more gold at Laverton

Brightstar Resources air-core drilling has yielded anomalous gold results at its Rowena, Jubilee and Sailor Prince historical gold mines. The old mines near Laverton in WA form part of the company’s Brightstar South project. The best result was 1m at 4.85 g/t gold at the Sailor Prince prospect with the 500m-long gold anomaly being aligned with the historical workings.

Brightstar is looking to build resources to restart its 485,000-tonne-per-year Brightstar gold processing plant, with all projects being within the highly endowed Laverton greenstone gold belt. Brightstar’s current resources sit at 7.1 million tonnes at 1.9 grams per tonne for 445,000 ounces of gold across several deposits within trucking distance of the mill.

Brightstar completed the Brightstar South air-core drilling program at the end of March. Drilling was on 200m centres with the widely-spaced air-core program designed to test areas of known historic mining, recent successful prospecting and to find new bedrock gold anomalies.  

51 air-core holes were completed for a total of 925m. The unconsolidated cover sequence was significantly thinner than expected in all areas drilled and in many holes cover was thin or absent.   

The best gold result was 1m at 4.85 g/t from 20m at Sailors Prince within a 500m-long zone grading better than 100 parts per billion gold. The anomaly was in clay above basalt bedrock and aligned with historical workings. The company says more drilling is required to determine the fresh rock opportunity along this structural corridor. It believes there appears to be significant indications of a mineralised system and no evidence that it has been fully extracted. Limited historical information was available on the workings of old mines.  

At Jubilee, 1m intercepts reached a peak of 933 parts per billion from 20m. The anomalous result was from basalt in the southernmost hole and is not closed off to the south or east. More work is required to determine the extent and orientation of the anomaly.

At Rowena, the highest result was 1m at 345 parts per billion in basalt from 12m downhole. The 200m spaced air-core holes were thought to be too widely spaced to properly assess the mineralisation.

Commenting on the results, Brightstar Resources Managing Director, William Hobba, said: “These results confirm the existence of gold mineralised systems at each of the prospects. Further work integrating historic information with modern exploration techniques will allow the company to create new opportunities in the project area. The potential to develop multiple operations in the Brightstar South region remains a key focus for Brightstar.”

Brightstar South is near the 2.7 million-ounce Granny Smith deposit to the west and is within the East Yilgarn Craton with a total endowment of more than 27 million ounces.

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