WA
Austin Metals Limited (“Company”) completed the acquisition for an 80% interest in the Austin Gold Project through the acquisition of 80% of the shares in the capital of GT from the Vendor (“Acquisition”), as announced to the ASX on 7 April 2021. The Austin Gold Project is located in the highly prospective Murchison greenstone province of Western Australia, directly adjacent to the Cue Gold Project owned by Musgrave Minerals Limited (ASX:MGV), which includes the high grade Break of Day Deposit and Starlight discovery (Figure 1).
Strategic Project Location
The Austin Gold Project is located 45 km north of Mt Magnet and comprises 175 square kilometres in the highly prospective Tuckabianna and Mt Magnet greenstone belts of the prolific Murchison gold mining district (Figure 1). The Murchison Province is reported to have historically produced over 17Moz of gold with significant current resources and exciting recent new discoveries by a variety of companies including Musgrave Minerals. The Austin Gold Project is also well located within 50 km of two operating mills held by Ramelius and Wesgold adjacent to the Great Northern Highway (Figure 1).
The Austin Gold Project is centred around one granted mining license at Mt Sandy and surrounded by three larger granted exploration licenses and one small prospecting license (Figure 1). The project has been privately held by various companies for over 20 years with very little modern day exploration programs conducted throughout the package. However, widespread alluvial and hard rock gold has been recovered near surface exposures throughout the package by prospectors over many years. A handful of shallow drill programs have been conducted in the past with significant gold results that have never been followed up adequately.
RC and Diamond Drilling Program
The diamond and RC drilling programs at Austin are now both complete. The program comprised a total of 30 holes or RC drilling for 3,563 metres as well as 4 diamond holes for 466 metres. The results of this program have been highly encouraging with the identification of visual sulphide mineralisation and associated quartz veining over good widths at all three prospects targeted, being Brunswick Hill, Brians and Mt Sandy. Samples are currently being shipped to Laboratories where assays are awaited and will be reported as they come to hand.
Figure 1: Interpreted geology map of the Mt Magnet and Tuckabianna Greenstone Belts showing the location of the Austin Gold Project tenement outlines with respect to the licenses held by Musgrave Minerals and Caprice Resource. Resource estimates by Musgrave Minerals are total combined Indicated and Inferred JORC 2012 estimates
Figure 2: Photograph of polished gossanous quartz vein with abundant visible gold recently sampled by the Company from the outcrop exposures in the north face of the Brians historic pit.
Figure 3: RC Drill Rig at the Austin Gold Project.