King River moves to wake sleeping WA Murchison goldfield

It is often said that some of the best real estate for finding gold is right next door to where it has already been discovered. Better still is to look beneath an old mine or rummage through the waste piles left behind by old-timers who chased only the richest ore in a far lower gold price environment.

After years of waiting for the right project to relight its exploration story, King River Resources appears to have found its centrepiece at Mindoolah. In this historic Cue goldfield, old mine dumps, a puzzling production mismatch and untested lode positions are now being revisited with smart methods and modern exploration tools.

The company has mobilised a reverse circulation (RC) drill rig to the project, 70km north-west of the historic town of Cue in WA’s Murchison region, to test whether the old goldfield can deliver a modern prize from near-surface stockpiles and deeper hard-rock targets below old shallow open pits, most of which were mined in the 1980’s.

Mindoolah has been the focus of a rapid reset since King River moved in this year, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Auradoolah. The company has framed the acquisition as a new chapter built around high-grade gold in a proven WA mining district, rather than another early-stage idea still looking for a point of difference.

King River also has a useful financial tailwind behind its Mindoolah push stemming from a holding of roughly 90 million shares in ASX-listed Tivan, received after selling its Speewah Dome vanadium project. With Tivan trading at 27.7c, the stake is worth close to $25 million.

The project has a long history of early 1900’s underground workings and later shallow open pits, with historical records pointing to high-grade production and company records indicating an average production of up to 19 grams per tonne (g/t) gold. King River says much of the old mining was constrained by the water table, with shallow mining depths down to just 20m and the higher economic cut-off grades of the day.

That history has left King River with two immediate questions. First, how much gold remains in the old stockpiles and waste dumps because of the high-grade cut-offs of the day? Second, did previous miners and drillers miss the true shape of the lodes by chasing what they could see at surface rather than the structures that fed and hosted them?

The stockpile question came to the fore after King River completed a LiDAR survey of the various dumps in May, coupled with volumetric calculations. The assessment pointed to a major mismatch between the 38,589 tonnes of officially reported 1980’s produ