Our Irvine Gold Project has just grown again, and this time in a new direction. Scout drilling 725 metres north of our existing JORC Mineral Resource has intersected two zones of gold mineralisation, in an area we'd never drill tested before. This matters because it extends the known footprint of the project towards the Stawell Gold Mine and confirms the same style of mineralisation we see at our Resolution Lode is showing up well beyond it.

The intercepts themselves are encouraging: 4.25m at 1.42g/t gold from 173m, including a higher-grade section of 1.5m at 3.16g/t, and separately 5.65m at 0.83g/t from 341.5m, including 0.85m at 3.19g/t. These results sit within a conceptual exploration target we'd identified using geophysics and surface geochemistry, and it's genuinely pleasing to see the first hole into that target come back with mineralisation in similar rock types to Resolution.

It's worth being clear about what this is and isn't. This is first-pass scout drilling in a conceptual target, not a resource. Further drilling is needed before we can say how extensive or continuous this mineralisation is, and there's no certainty it will ever convert to a JORC Mineral Resource. The exploration target ranges we've outlined for Irvine remain exactly that: conceptual, with insufficient drilling to date to estimate a resource.

What we can say is that Irvine now shows mineralisation over more than 5.5km of strike, growing at depth, along strike and now towards Stawell, alongside our producing Fiddlers Creek mine, the Comstock project and the Wedderburn mill. Drilling continues.

If you have questions about this announcement, we'd encourage you to send them through the question box on this page.