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Exploring the Potential of Australia’s Yalgoo Region
Aug. 08, 2024 01:00PM PST
Resource Investing News 
Hans Wismeijer / Shutterstock
The largely underexplored polymetallic potential of Australia’s Yalgoo region is seeing renewed interest from both miners and investors.
In Western Australia, a strip of land in the southern rangelands, about 450 kilometres from Perth, has both a rich history and rich future mining potential.
The Yalgoo region, also known as the Yalgoo Goldfield, has a history of gold prospecting and productive mines. Now, new technology-enabled discoveries are making the area of interest again, with polymetallic potential across the region.
Discoveries in Yalgoo are now ranging beyond gold to include silver, copper, zinc, lead and lithium in the 50,000 square kilometre region.
The potential is turning this region that previously relied on tourism — of old mines and ghost towns — and sheep grazing as its main economy into a draw for exploration and new mining ventures.
Yalgoo’s gold rush
In the 1890s, gold prospectors travelling through the area on their way to established gold rush towns became its first settlers. Then, five residents found gold in Yalgoo — 3 kilograms, they said — and established the Emerald Reward mine. A town sprang up around the mine, with a rail line coming in by 1898. Emerald Reward closed in 1908.
Other nearby projects include Joker Tunnel, about 10 kilometres from Yalgoo Shire, where miners excavated 550 tonnes of rock to find just 3 kilograms of gold in the process. The tunnel is now a tourist attraction.
Paynes Find dates back to a discovery of gold in 1911, and was a busy mine until the 1930s. It’s still a tourist attraction. In nearby Gullewa, prospectors found gold in 1894, which led to a settlement in the area.
One of the first gold mines ever developed in the area was the Messenger’s Patch mine, built in the early 1900s and was known for its high-grade deposits. Although it has since been an area of interest among prospectors and producers, it remains underexplored.
Promising geology
The Yalgoo region is rife with polymetallic mineralization. The Yalgoo-Singleton Greenstone Belt, which has been well studied, contains world-class volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits that include zinc, copper, gold, silver and lead.
The area has also shown potential for uranium (palaeochannel and calcrete), vanadium, iron ore and lithium.Modern mining
The area’s most long standing operation is the Golden Grove mine, which dates back to a 1971 discovery of copper, lead, silver, zinc and gold. It began full-scale operations in 1997 and includes two underground operations: Gossan Hill and Scuddles. Since 2020, the operation has been owned by 29Metals (ASX:29M,OTC Pink:TWNMF).
Two of the largest magnetite iron ore mines in Australia are also located in the region: Karara and Sino. The Karara iron ore project is a multibillion-tonne resource operation capable of a long mine life of more than 30 years. Citic Pacific Mining’s Sino iron project includes both a mining and processing operation.
The Rothsay Gold mine, owned by Silver Lake Resources (ASX:SLR), is a high-grade underground gold mine. It dates back to 1894, and was re-explored in the 1990s. The mine is still active with new partner Redpath Australia taking over the contract for underground mining services in 2020.
New interest
Enterprise Metals (ASX:ENT) is developing its Yalgoo project, focused on gold with potential for copper, zinc and lithium in a licensed area of 125 square kilometres.
Tempest Minerals (ASX:TEM) has four assets in Yalgoo spanning 1,000 square kilometres of largely unexplored land with potential for gold, zinc, copper, silver, iron ore, tungsten, rare earths and more. Located four hours from Perth, Tempest’s projects are close to established gold and copper mines and major infrastructure.
The company is currently focused on two priority drill targets: Remorse, which is prospective for copper; and Sanity, with rock chip samples showing 7 grams per ton of gold, 0.2 percent copper and more than 60 percent iron. These two targets will be the focus of future drill programs in the near term.
Warriedar Resources’ (ASX:WA8) two highly prospective projects in the region host a combined resource of 15.2 million tonnesat 1.7 grams per tonne gold for 816,000 ounces.
Even Paynes Find, a historic mining region, may yield lithium. Golden State Mining (ASX:GSM) has licenced (and applied to licence) to more than 1,300 square kilometres.
Investor takeaway
Prospectors more than a century ago saw potential in this quiet strip of land in Western Australia. A mixture of technology-driven theoretical work and recent drilling suggest the Yalgoo region has polymetallic potential. Strong local infrastructure, a stable political situation and access to myriad data sources, past and present, is drawing investors to Yalgoo.
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