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DIGGERS & DEALERS PREVIEW
Historical occurrence:
Kookynie shakes off a century
of inertia
Carnavale chief executive Humphrey Hale inspects aircore
samples from the company’s recent drilling at Kookynie months confirming the resources at Kookynie and investigating
REFINING THE GOLD STANDARD abcrefinery.com
by Dominic Piper
ne of Western Australia’s last forgotten gold towns appears
Oset for its moment in the sun thanks to an emerging crop of
junior developers and explorers.
Two hundred kilometres north of Kalgoorlie and 50km south
of Leonora, Kookynie would appear the ideal setting for a gold
revival. The area was a prolific gold producer in the early years
of the WA gold rush, producing more than 600,000oz @ 15 g/t
between 1897 and 1911 (enough to host a population of 3,500
people and 11 hotels). However, while other areas have enjoyed
rejuvenation over the ensuing century, Kookynie’s goldfields,
like its town centre, have been almost forgotten.
The old-time prospectors came unstuck when they encountered
the water table but in recent decades, explorers have ignored
Kookynie due to a veneer of transported cover and a structural
environment less conducive to large-scale deposits.
“In modern times, since the move to CIL processing, the focus
in WA gold exploration has been on finding big open pit oxide
deposits and these high-grade underground deposits have been
forgotten about to some extent,” Carnavale Resources Ltd chief
executive Humphrey Hale told GMJ.
That attitude is beginning to change. Last year, Genesis Minerals
Ltd paid $13.5 million for a 248sq km land package at Kookynie,
immediately adding 246,000oz @ 1.7 g/t to the 838,000oz @
3.4 g/t it already had in its cornerstone Ulysses deposit to the
north.
“We always believed we need 1 moz rather than 500,000oz in
the mine plan reserve so we saw the combination of Ulysses
and Kookynie as a much better proposition for shareolders,”
Genesis managing director Michael Fowler told GMJ.
Fowler shares Hale’s thoughts on the potential of Kookynie,
seeing similarities to Genesis’ original acquisition of Ulysses.
“When we acquired Ulysses in 2015, it had seen almost no
work between 2001 and 2015,” he said. “It had a resource of
125,000oz, but that now that stands at 1.6 moz altogether.
Kookynie is the same. The companies which have held the
ground were poorly funded and had little technical capabilities,
so Kookynie essentially missed a couple of gold exploration
booms. If we can have the same success as we did at Ulysses,
there is a lot of upside.”
Having acquired the ground in June 2020, Genesis spent nine
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