Great Southern Mining’s hunt for quality gold assets that can be quickly brought back into production has led to an agreement to acquire the historical high-grade Cox’s Find gold mine near Laverton, WA.
Cox’s Find is located just 10km and along strike from Regis Resources’ Garden Well gold deposit and 80km from Goldfields’ Granny Smith mill.
Management said that historical records reviewed to date indicate that the mine was Western Mining Corporation’s first venture into gold production in Australia and produced about 77,000 ounces of gold at an average grade of 21.94 grams per tonne gold between 1935 and 1942.
The mine has had multiple owners since that time and has been dormant for over 30 years under private ownership.
The project site contains an historical open cut and underground workings, waste dumps, tailings pads and remnant stockpiles of ore that might well be worth investigating.
Great Southern plans to apply modern exploration techniques to the project with a focus on step-out drilling from the open pit and underground workings.
There is also potential for the discovery of in-situ resources that were below the high historical cut-off grades used at the time of the previous mining activity
The company is currently carrying out due diligence on the three granted mining leases that host the Cox’s Find project.
It will be required to pay an initial $50,000 in cash following a four-week due diligence period and a further $150,000 following an additional eight-week period and the completion of successful due diligence.
Should the company proceed with the acquisition, it will have to make an $800,000 cash payment within 12 months of entering a formal sale and purchase agreement and a further $1 million in cash or shares on the declaration of a JORC-compliant mineral resource of at least 500,000 ounces of gold.
Great Southern will also pay the vendors a net smelter royalty of 1.5%.
Executive Chairman John Terpu said:“The management team have been busy researching unloved quality gold assets that could quickly return to production scenarios. The focus has been on the Laverton region to compliment the company’s exploration activities at the Mon Ami gold project.
“Having been on care and maintenance for over 30 years under private ownership, the Cox’s Find Gold Mine is an old high-grade mining project that has missed out on major advances in exploration techniques and a resurgence in the gold price.”
The company’s existing Mon Ami project is located just 13km from the Granny Smith mill and started life as a small-scale 50,000-ounce open-pit gold mine before progressing into an underground development that produced an additional 172,000 gold ounces at an incredible grade of 22.6g/t gold.
The project currently has a JORC compliant mineral resource of 1.1 million tonnes grading 1.7g/t gold for 59,000 ounces that does not include mineralisation below a depth of 150m or potential down-plunge extensions adjacent to the regionally prospective Barnicoat shear zone.
It won’t come as any surprise that the Cox’s Find project still has some legs to it, given the number of companies that have made decent money from Western Mining’s “discarded” but quality projects in the past.
The high gold grades reported from historical mining at Cox’s Find also provides the potential for Great Southern to build a significant war chest of gold resources, while its proximity to the Granny Smith mill opens up the potential for early cash flow through toll treating.
Watch this space.
By Matt Birney
