Aureka drills for fast-track gold restart at historic Vic gold pit
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Murray Region
Aureka Limited has officially put the drill rods to work at its historic St Arnaud Comstock gold project in Victoria, sending a diamond drill rig to the former Walkers pit to unlock near-term production potential.
The new program is designed to create a fast track to first production as the young explorer puts the slide rule to work on the basic economics of the project.
At the top of the priority list, Aureka will be going after some spectacular shallow historical hits in the immediate target area.
The project’s near-surface origins were previously highlighted by drilling in the mid-1980s; these drillings were yielding a hefty grading of 7.2 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 18 meters with a 14 meter spacing; This meant a cumulative intercept of 100.8 grams.
‘We are pursuing our goal of realizing the first possible portfolio production from Comstock.’
James Gurry, managing director of Aureka Limited
Other vintage hits at the target include a 2.2m run at an eye-catching 27.4g/t gold from 63.2m and another hole measuring a 3.1m slice yielding a tasty 17.24g/t gold from 22.5m.
Recent field work has confirmed that gold is still talking, with a sample taken from the western mine wall in April yielding an impressive analysis of 6.04 g/t gold.
“The company says the campaign is a targeted, six-week assault designed to quickly build confidence around the deposit. The program will see the rig drill 1000 meters of the hole over six short holes, with each hole having an average depth of 100 metres.
Tightly spaced holes are intended to validate legacy datasets and potentially upgrade the existing 100 percent inferred JORC resource to higher confidence classifications.
To keep the numbers real when compiling the resource model, Aureka will use a conservative 30 g/t gold cut-off grade alongside the standard 0.5 g/t gold cut-off grade to prevent high-grade spikes from distorting the broader picture.
Aureka Limited managing director James Gurry said: “IT like that pleasant with To see ONE exciting filling program Now continues at Comstock, where we provide multiple reports examples related to visible And high grade gold inside 2025.”
Geological mapping showed that the actual width of these targets could be 80 percent of downhole drilling, opening up three highly lucrative possibilities for the project.
First, it proves that underground gold mineralization is actually thick rather than a narrow structural illusion. Secondly, it confirms that the drilling geometry of the geos exactly achieves the targets, and thirdly, it suggests an extremely favorable low waste-to-ore ratio should the company choose to press the button for open-pit mining.
While Comstock could offer a quick cash flow angle through its 56,500 ounce gold resource grading 1.21 g/t, this is still just one pillar of Aureka’s broader Victorian asset strategy.
The company’s flagship asset is the Irvine gold project in the Stawell Corridor, which has a significant inferred resource of 304,000 ounces of gold and is located just 10 miles from the 5.3 million ounce operating Stawell gold mine. The project is also forward-looking in terms of antimony.
Aureka also holds other regional Victorian assets, including the Jubilee gold exploration project near Ballarat and the Morning Bill gold and base metal project 25 kilometers southwest of Ararat.
Going forward, the geological data collected from this current campaign will directly contribute to concept and scoping studies aimed at defining technical and financial forecasts.
To significantly reduce risks along the processing route, management commissioned paid milling experts Core Prospecting to investigate the transportation of ore by trucks to nearby regional facilities with spare capacity.
With active rotation of the drill rods and a clear line of sight towards development, Aureka moves its pieces quickly across the board.
It looks like the young explorer is wasting no time turning his rich geological heritage into a significant amount of Victorian gold.
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