ASX-listed explorer, Godolphin Resources, has returned a couple of very encouraging gold hits from the first hole of a phase two RC drilling program at its Mount Aubrey gold project in the venerated gold-copper Lachlan Fold Belt province in NSW.
The Orange-based gold junior is looking to join a conga line of canny explorers and project developers in Australia who are successfully reviving, or hoping to revive, historic mothballed gold mining areas against a backdrop of record gold prices.
Last month Godolphin was forced to temporarily suspend the phase two, 11-hole RC drill program because of heavy rainfall. However, the company has been buoyed by results from the one hole it managed to complete before the deluge.
Notable intersections from that hole were 7m going 1.52 grams per tonne gold from 36m in the targeted shallow oxide zone and 3m at 7.41 g/t from 99m, including 1m at 21 g/t in previously untested fresh rock just above the interpreted contact between the sediments and overlying basalt.
Godolphin Resources Chief Executive, Dave Greenwood said: “The assay results … further confirm the basalt/sediment contact, identified in phase one drilling in January 2020, as an important exploration target for gold mineralisation. A further four drill holes some 500m to the east are planned to test this same contact in the current drill program.”
Phase two drilling work, which is set to resume once ground conditions have improved sufficiently to allow the rig to fire up again, will also home in on historical gold-in-soil anomalies and geophysical targets identified in an old ground-based IP survey and a ground magnetic survey done by by Godolphin.
The Mt Aubrey deposit, one of Godolphin’s main projects, incorporates three backfilled shallow open pits mined in 1990 by BHP who extracted about 120,000 tonnes of ore averaging 3.3 grams per tonne gold from an epithermal vein system.
Ardea Resources spun out more than 3,000sqkm of prospective tenements in the Lachlan Fold Belt to form Godolphin last year. Ardea released an inferred mineral resource estimate for Mt Aubrey of 1.2 million tonnes at 1.61 g/t for 62,400 ounces of contained gold about 12 months ago.
The Boda porphyry copper-gold discovery made by Alkane Resources last year put the spotlight firmly on the gold-copper prospectivity of the Lachlan Fold Belt and Godolphin boasts a solid grab bag of acreage in the region that may well attract potential joint venture partners if it continues to get interesting gold sniffs.
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By Matt Birney
