Archives: Projects

The Mount Strawbridge project comprises an application for a 43-block Exploration Licence (E38/4034) in the northeastern part of the Eastern Goldfields about 160km northeast of Laverton and about 90km northwest of the Gruyere mine in the Mt Margaret Mineral Field.

The applied area lies a little over 5km west of the Yamarna Fault System, a broad crustal-scale fault system that separates the Burtville Terrane from the Yamarna Terrane to the east. The tenement application is cut by several faults subparallel to the Yamarna Fault System.

The limited historical exploration on the tenement was hindered by an incomplete understanding of the regolith and the influence of Permian sedimentation and glaciation, and possibly unsuitable size fractions for soil programs. Much of the area is covered by aeolian sands. A similar approach to sampling and regolith mapping on Jerrys Bore will be undertaken at Mount Strawbridge.

Jerrys Bore

The Jerrys Bore project comprises an application for a 67-block Exploration Licence (E38/4032) in the northeastern part of the Eastern Goldfields about 165km north of Laverton in the Mt Margaret Mineral Field.

The application covers part of the poorly exposed Deleta greenstone belt in the Burtville Terrane. The area under application covers a strike length of more than 20km along and adjacent to the De La Poer Fault, a major north-northwest–trending fault. Much of the area is covered by aeolian sands.

Other than some RAB and AC holes in the far north of the application area, there has been no previous drilling. Breaker Resources identified some low-level gold and arsenic anomalies in shallow auger holes¹ but never progressed to drilling any targets.

Westar recently commissioned a remote sensing and mapping consultant, Dr Rich Langford, to produce a regolith–landform model of E38/4032 that will provide context for future regolith sampling and geochemistry. The model was prepared using TanDEM satellite elevation data (Langford, 2024; Earth Science, Systems and Society, v. 4, Issue 1, 10111) coupled with multispectral and radiometric imagery.

Westar has recently received a LiDAR-derived DEM over E38/4032 from Aerometrex to provide better topographic control for a region that has very little relief. This will enable the Company to refine the regolith–landform interpretation before any soil sampling programs. The Company has also carried out an orientation survey to determine the best material and size fraction for a soil sampling program targeting zones of anomalism identified by Breaker Resources a decade ago.

The tenement application is located about 470km SW of Katherine and covers an area of 619km². The area is crossed by the unsealed Buntine Highway and the Mistake Creek–Inverway Road.

The Company’s intention is to identify sedimentary-hosted copper and other base metal deposits within the applied area of the Birrindudu Basin. The targeted deposits are analogues to sedimentary copper deposits in the Central African Copperbelt, the Kupferscheifer district in Germany and Poland, and White Pine in Michigan.

Recently completed and ongoing work conducted by the NTGS and CSIRO on drill core from within the Birrindudu Basin, has highlighted its potential to host stratiform sedimentary copper deposits^1,2. This work has provided evidence that a copper source is present, that oxidised basinal fluids have leached copper from the basement geology, and that a suitable reductant is present in the lower part of the succession (Amos Knob Formation). This ongoing work is novel and highlights the Birrindudu Basin as a potential new frontier district for copper mineralisation.

Area selection was heavily influenced by 1:250,000 scale mapping conducted by the NTGS and insights provided by the ongoing CSIRO/NTGS project. EL34118 contains much of the Limbunya Group of the Birrindudu Basin. The Limbunya Group is the lower group of the stratigraphy and is known to contain a pyritic shale unit (Amos Knob formation). It is probable that this is the first reductant unit that would be encountered by circulating fertile fluids. The presence of evaporites within the succession also provides a ready source of salt for basinal brines to transport base metals³.