The wider Charters Towers district is set to get its due as one of the premier gold mining regions in the country … again.

Sunshine Metals managing director Damien Keys goes so far as to say current mining and exploration is leading to a resurgence in relevance for the region, back to the point where it was known as ‘The World’ and boasted one of the largest populations in Queensland.

The best example was Ravenswood Gold, which produced 54,500 ounces of gold in the September quarter.

Related: Ravenswood Gold celebrates production record

Dr Keys told the Noosa Mining Investor Conference that Sunshine’s Liontown Resource was proving its worth in a similar vein.

“We’re rapidly increasing the Liontown resource and we’ve got a significant resource upgrade due in the start of December this year,” he said.

“We’ve been all guns blazing towards that since, I guess, our maiden drilling campaign where we hit 17m 22g gold. … It hasn’t incorporated 20m at 18g gold within that same part of the gold panel.

“We think we’re due for a significant upgrade in tonnes in the Liontown system, but in particular the gold and copper part of the system. Flowing on from that, we expect to be able to announce in gold equivalent terms. “

The message from junior miners seemed to be getting lost in a market that was witnessing sustained record gold prices, Dr Keys said.

That could be set to change for Sunshine Metals in the near future when the company could report in the more fashionable ‘equivalent’ terms where they could be compared to their peers, he said.

Image at top of page: Visible gold in RC drilling chip from Liontown.

“So we think a bit of the message is being lost at the moment, having to report by JORC requirements in zinc equivalent terms.

“Zinc as it stands, is the dominant contained metal value driver for the project. But with the work that we’ve done in the foot wall of Liontown, we expect the copper-gold to take over, gold in particular. And we think we’ll report in a gold equivalent by the end of the year.” 

The region was underexplored when considering the amount of gold that’s been mined from isolated pockets over a period of more than 140 years, Dr Keys said.

This included production of more than 20 million ounces of gold from various operations including Ravenswood Gold, Pajingo, Charters Towers, Mount Leyshon and Highway Reward among others.

There was plenty of more to find, Dr Keys said.

“There’s certainly a lot of life in the district yet. I started as an early career open pit and underground geo at Ravenswood, and it was one of these areas that when you’re a young geo in a pit, you think these things are almost done.

“It’s only when you sort of get further down the track and you see the data sets and you can step outside of the pit. Ravenswood would maybe two Ks (kilometres)  in any direction and all of a sudden the data’s gone from detailed high quality data to baseline very first pass.”

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