Australasian Metals’ maiden drill program at the Capella gold project in Central Queensland has returned high-grade gold intercepts.

The 1644m reverse circulation (RC) program focused on verifying historical drilling at the Ayres Rock prospect for the delineation of a JORC resource, as well as testing an identified trend of mineralisation to the north-west of this prospect.

Intercepts included 26m grading at 3.88 g/t gold from 45m, including 2m at 33.4 g/t gold from 50m.

“We are pleased with the results of our maiden drilling program at Capella, which was successful in validating the historical thick, high-grade mineralisation, and which gives us further confidence in the project shaping up to be a significant high-grade gold project,” Australasian Metals managing director Qingtao Zeng said.

“The high-grade nature has been confirmed with visible gold being panned from RC chips.

“Our results indicate that the high-grade, thick mineralisation is controlled by the north-south striking faulting structure. The previous mobile metal iron (MMI) data may have been displaced due to the surface weathering.”

He said mineralisation had only been tested to less than 100m from surface, and the grade and thickness of the mineralisation were strong.

“We can’t wait to drill a diamond hole at Capella to find out the geometry of the orebody at depth,” Dr Zeng said.