Regional Setting

The West Tanami Project

The West Tanami Project is the belt scale gold project in WA. The project is located within the Granites Tanami Orogen in the Tanami Desert located approximately 1,850km northeast of Perth and 240km southeast of Halls Creek, immediately west of the Northern Territory border with Western Australia.

West Tanami comprises 100km of strike along the major structural corridor (Trans-Tanami Structure) that extends through the Tanami region of WA (Figure 1). Hamelin Gold’s ground holdings in the Tanami covers 2,277km2 of a well mineralised, emerging gold province that is significantly underexplored.

The West Tanami Project area has been subject to sporadic and fragmented exploration in the past. The attraction of the project area was initially enhanced by new datasets provided by the Geological Survey of WA and material new near mine gold discoveries at Newmont’s +14Moz Callie gold mine (in Northern Territory, across the WA boarder from the West Tanami Project).

The West Tanami Project contains several prospects with large multi kilometre scale gold and arsenic anomalous geochemistry in near surface drilling and untested geophysical anomalies. The ground holding is held 100% by Hamelin Resources Pty Ltd a wholly owned subsidiary of Hamelin Gold.

Exploration on the project tenements by previous explorers from the early 1990s to 2019 has shown similar styles of gold mineralisation to the known economic mineralisation in the district including the +14Moz Callie gold deposit in the Northern Territory Tanami region (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – West Tanami leasing with gold occurrences over regional gravity data

Most of the exploration drilling has been in the form of very shallow RAB and vacuum drilling less than 10m deep which has not been an effective screening tool for bedrock mineralisation.

Large areas of the project remain untested and the area is vastly underexplored but highly prospective for high grade orogenic shoot/vein style gold deposits which have been mined by others during the last 120 years in the Granites Tanami Orogen within the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

The West Tanami Project contains open, high-grade gold intersections under shallow cover, significant multi-kilometre scale unexplored geochemical anomalies and a suite of untested geophysical targets with supporting geochemistry.

These key prospects contain significant drill intercept including:

  • 10m at 5.4 g/t Au at Hutch’s Find;
  • 7.25m at 3.09 g/t Au at Camel;
  • 18m at 0.69 g/t Au at Mojave;
  • 3m at 5.2 g/t Au at Afghan;
  • 6m at 1.71 g/t Au at Fremlins; and § 3m at 4.33 g/t Au at Ginger.

All prospects demonstrate gold mineralisation within faults and complex folded structures and in many areas within defined stratigraphic units or contacts between units.

The tenement package represents one of the largest contiguous land holdings in the Granites Tanami Orogen containing prospective Stubbins Formation, the time equivalent host strata of the +14Moz Callie gold deposit, and located within the regionally significant Trans-Tanami fault corridor.

Figure 2 – Key prospect locations on detailed aeromagnetics

Evidence of the lack of effective exploration is shown from analysis of the drillhole depth data as follows.

  • 38% of the total number of holes in the drillhole database are less than 5m deep; and
  • more than 68% or 13,139 out of the 19,200 drillholes are 10m or shallower (Figure 3).
Figure 3 – All drill collars and drill collars > 100m

Much of the near surface drilling represents the equivalent of a point soil or rock chip sample taken beneath the shallow aeolian desert sand cover. A total of 2,789 RAB/Aircore holes and 277 RC/Diamond holes represent the entire exploration drilling into residual prospective geology. 658 of these holes returned gold assay results greater than 0.1g/t Au or 100ppb Au.