Is Gold fever about to break out in Western Australia?
Matthew Bohlsen | October 10, 2018 | 1 Comment
How many have been following the recent gold market news in Western Australia? There have been two recent discoveries getting a lot of attention from investors. The Beta Hunt Mine, Kambalda
A mine near Kambalda south of Kalgoorlie has produced what its owner believes are two of the biggest gold specimens in recorded history. The biggest of the specimens came in at 95 kg and is estimated by the company to contain about 2,440 ounces of gold. It’s believed it took 3 men to lift the rock.
The second-biggest piece weighed 63 kg. Early estimates from RNC Minerals initially put the total take of coarse gold from the cut at more than 9,000 Oz; however this has recently been updated to 30-35,000 Oz, and is likely to grow further as the high grade structures were extended by a further 340 metres, from the previous 200m extension.
Driller Henry Dole has been credited with uncovering the astonishing find at the 45-year-old Beta Hunt gold mine near Kambalda south of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Henry said: “As I was drilling it, you could see the gold shavings coming out of all the holes and I thought ‘there’s something here’. And then after we fired it and I came in the next day and washed it all down, it was just everywhere. It was unbelievable and I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
95 kg specimen stone and a 63 kg specimen stone recovered from the Beta Hunt mine in Western Australia
Excitement in the area mounts with Lefroy Exploration having found hundreds of gold nuggets over the past five years on its 600 sq km land package, just 10 km east of Beta Hunt. Managing director and veteran geologist Wade Johnson said the recent Beta Hunt discovery had re-energized explorers in the area and has excited potential investors. He has already received calls asking about available land for exploration near Beta Hunt.
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} The Pilbara
Johnathon Campbell, a miner for 16 years, secured a special prospecting license in September 2016 over the areas now known as Purdy’s Reward near Karratha also in Western Australia. Special prospecting licenses allow small time prospectors to search for gold within existing mining leases. “I got some hired help and went out there and started looking. We did our own exploration work and found that it soon stretched over about 8 km. If you turned on a metal detector you weren’t walking anywhere because there was too much gold,” he said. Mr. Campbell says he and wife Zoe stumbled across Purdy’s Reward and Comet Well while chasing wild cattle. “We found nuggets up to 10 ounces size-wise, but we found thousands of 2-gram and 1.5-gram nuggets. We were picking up anywhere from $10,000 a day at Comet Well in gold.”
The Pilbara covers an area of 502,000 km2 in Western Australia
Mr Campbell has made a tidy sum from the sale of the Comet Well leases to Novo Resources and is entitled to a $1 million discovery bonus if Novo defines a resource of over 250,000 ounces. A month earlier Novo had struck the deal with Artemis Resources to farm into the gold rights on the Purdy’s Reward project.
Mr Campbell stated: “I’ve got a lot of international interest in the actual royalty itself. They haven’t even come up with a resource yet, but I think people understand that this is pretty big.”
Is the Pilbara gold rush real? “100 per cent,” Mr. Campbell says. “If I can walk 8 km and dig a hole in the ground and find gold, there’s 8 km of gold. If I can dig 4 m down and find gold, there’s 4 m of gold.”
If gold fever is real there is going to be a need for some kind of cure as these gold regions are about to boom.
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