Dart Mining will begin drilling its 100 per cent owned Rushworth gold project in Victoria next month. The campaign will be guided by historic mine workings along 14kms of strike and drill chip assays as high as 10.6 grams per tonne gold.
The company says the historic workings target structurally controlled gold-rich areas that have been imaged by modern radar which shows over 4600 of the shallow mining excavations.
Dart says its upcoming diamond-core drilling program, to be completed with the company’s own rig, will be guided by the results of the radar survey and drill chip assays obtained via the re-sampling of cuttings from existing reverse-circulation (RC) drill holes.
The company says the best of those assays, 10.6 g/t gold, was co-incident with 0.26 per cent antimony and 370 parts per million (ppm) arsenic and show similar geochemistry to ore from the Fosterville gold mine, Victoria’s biggest gold producer.
Fosterville is an underground mine about 50km south-west of Rushworth operated by Canadian company Agnico Eagle. It pumped out an impressive 305,000 ounces of gold last year from its solid 1.67-million-ounce gold reserve.
The company is ready to continue exploration on a number of exciting gold targets across the highly prospective historic Rushworth Goldfield. The company expects to be drilling a range of targets, commencing in February 2024, and is looking forward to providing further updates and results as they come to hand. Dart Mining chairman James Chirnside.
Dart says it is eying up three target areas believed to be gold-rich at Rushworth - thrust fault hosted quartz vein packages, structural intersections and saddle reefs.
Thrust fault hosted gold rich quartz veins were historically mined along two parallel zones totalling 14kms of strike length which the company says offer the potential for significant tonnage given the downdip continuity of gold enrichment and repetitive nature of the veining.
Management says structural intersections between veins of different orientations have historically thrown up good gold grades in the Rushworth area and the company will target an area where it hopes to continue that trend where the north-south striking Growlers Reef structure meets east-west striking faults.
Rushworth’s saddle reefs, which are mineralised areas associated with the crest of a folded rock package, caught the eye of Geologists working for the Victorian Department of Mines in the 1880’s, in the 1890’s and once again in the 1920’s. Those geologists made recommendations to test the structures, however Dart will be the first company to do so.
In 2021, Dart drilled a 44-hole reverse-circulation program at Rushworth which returned gold assays as high as 12m at 1.26g/t from surface including a 2m section at 3.49g/t, 19m at 1.1g/t from surface including 5m at 2.3g/t and 3m at 4g/t from 18m including a high-grade chunk 1m thick grading a solid 10.8g/t.
Other assays from that program include 2m at 4.07g/t from 18m with a 1m section grading 7.1g/t gold, 3m at 1.32g/t from 16m including 1m at 3.1g/t and 1m grading 9.13g/t from 4m.
The tenement package at Rushworth consists of four exploration licences of which three are granted and one is under application. The area covers about 683 square kilometres of land 140km north of Melbourne.
The area is part of Victoria’s greater ‘Bendigo Zone’ which was assessed as containing a mid-case potential of about 32 million ounces of undiscovered gold when the Victorian Government assessed it from 2006 to 2009.
It’s not a bad time to be hunting for the precious metal which is trading at about $3060 per ounce today. Punters will no doubt have their eyes on the upcoming drilling campaign which Dart hopes will unlock more of the yellow metal that caught the eye of those early miners.
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