Victoria focused Stavely Minerals (ASX:SVY) has unearthed two new exploration prospects after soil geochemical sampling and rock-chip sampling unearthed discoveries at its Ararat Project in western Victoria.
Which follows on from a recent discovery of a ‘Stawell-style’ gold prospect at Cathcart Hill. The Stawell Goldfield has produced over 6 million ounces of historic and modern gold production.
The prolific Stawell mine has been in continuous operation since the mid 1980’s and has produced over 2 million ounces of gold.
Which is music to Stavely managing director Chris Cairns as at the White Lead Gold Prospect, soil geochemistry defined a a 1.2 kilometre long arsenic, copper, lead, and chromium anomaly consistent with that associated with the Stawell Gold deposit.
Rock chip samples were recorded up to 5.57g/t gold.
Cairns believes Stavely may have identified the hard-rock source of the alluvial gold in the White Lead historic workings. So it bears watching.
While at the Carroll’s Base Metals Prospect, soil geochemistry defined a 1.5 kilometre long and up to 500 metre wide zinc, copper, lead and chromium anomaly.
Interestingly, the soil anomaly is far larger than the soil anomaly associated with the Mt Ararat copper-gold-zinc deposit which contains a JORC Mineral Resource of 1.2 million tonnes at 2.0% copper, 0.5g/t gold, 0.4% zinc and 6g/t silver.
Positively, Stawell type mineralisation is more predictable and continuous than that at the nuggetty and challenging ‘ladder vein’ style of gold deposits at Bendigo and Ballarat.
While it is early days using an XRF analyser in the field at Ararat, there does appear significant promise.
Stavely will try to link the White Lead and Cathcart Hill Prospects to demonstrate some 4-5 kilometres of ‘Stawell-style’ surface anomalism associated with similar rock types and structural controls to the Stawell Gold Deposit.
Then from that - develop a number of big drill targets.
In January 2013, Cairns engineered a sale of Integra Mining to Silver Lake Resources (ASX:SLR) for $426 million at the time of the bid. This exploration campaign has promise.
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