ASX-listed Magmatic Resources could be closing in on a serious gold discovery at its Parkes joint venture in central NSW, just 25kms southeast of the 4 million ounce Northparkes copper-gold mine.
The well-connected junior explorer, who counts Gold Fields Australia as a 20% cornerstone investor, told the ASX this week that a maiden RC drill program at the MacGregors and MacGregors South prospects in the Parkes joint venture had identified a 2km-long gold trend within the Parkes fault zone.
MacGregors is a structurally hosted gold target similar to the mineralisation hosting the 760,000-ounce Tomingley gold deposit about 50km further along strike. It also has porphyry copper-gold targets similar to Northparkes.
The best results to-date from 3 holes drilled at MacGregors include 10m grading 1.25 g/t gold from 146m and 15m at 0.74 g/t gold from 108m.
The new results are a significant improvement over the best numbers achieved by Gold Fields, who sold Parkes and three other projects in the East Lachlan province to Magmatic Resources ahead of its ASX debut in May last year.
Gold Fields spent a total of $13.5 million on exploration at the project, drilling 2,000 holes for 160,000m across the Lachlan East province. The best result from previous drilling at MacGregors was 19m at 0.63 g/t gold, however Magmatic has already doubled the best gold grade by changing the orientation of the drill rig based on a new structural interpretation.
At MacGregors South, Magmatic only had an arsenic-gold soil anomaly to work with, however a number of shallow RC holes have now made some encouraging gold hits, including 5m at 0.71 g/t from surface and 2m at 1.47 g/t from 30 metres.
Magmatic Managing Director, David Richardson, who founded Magmatic after 10 years as a venture capitalist said: “These results follow our successful drilling at the Lady Ilse 10km copper-gold trend and Boxdale-Carlisle Reefs 15km gold trend. These results give Magmatic three significant gold projects, with follow up work programs planned for the next quarter.”
The East Lachlan province is elephant country, with an endowment of 70 million ounces of gold and 14 million tonnes of copper, most of which has been discovered in the past 25 years.
Magmatic is a serious explorer targeting big discoveries of orogenic gold, porphyry copper-gold and polymetallic skarns. Last year the company signed up the Japanese Government’s resources agency JOGMEC as a joint venture partner at Parkes, one of only five JVs JOGMEC has entered into in Australia.
JOGMEC can earn up to 51% by spending $3 million over three years.
This week Magmatic reported that the encouraging initial results at the Parkes JV had encouraged JOGMEC to increase its first-year spend on exploration from $1m to $1.35m. This has enabled the completion of the MacGregors-MacGregors South drill program and the diamond drill program at the Alectown prospect.
Assay results are pending from Alectown and could give investors another reason to take a closer look at Magmatic as it gathers momentum in one of Australia’s most prolific mineral districts.
