Basket Swamp

Geological setting and mineral system

The prospect lies in the Permo-Triassic, high-K, I-type granite province of the Tenterfield–Stanthorpe region, southern New England Orogen, hosted entirely within the Lower Triassic Stanthorpe Adamellite (English 1996; GSNSW DIGS R00002143). Mineralisation occupies a steeply west-dipping structure striking 022°, expressed as a 15–20 m quartz–sericite alteration zone hosting a high-grade silver lode; old workings traceable ≈ 350 m north of the open cut give an interpreted strike length of at least 450 m. The company petrography (Ashley, UNE, in R00002143) records a tetrahedrite–galena–sphalerite–chalcopyrite–native-silver ± ?dyscrasite assemblage — a close match to the granite-related polymetallic silver lodes of the province (Webbs, Conrad) rather than the disseminated Timbarra gold style invoked in the 1996 report summary. The system has been drill-tested to a true vertical depth of only ≈ 45 m — a figure that assumes a level collar datum, as collar RLs are not recorded — and is interpreted to be open along strike and at depth. The steep westerly dip is an interpretation from costean geometry, and no shoot-plunge geometry has yet been reconstructed from any primary record: both are structural inferences, not measurements.

The grades — what the system has already demonstrated

Hero results and confirmation status — the only intercepts quoted in this document
1898 recorded production — 17 t of native-silver ore treated for 3,659 oz Ag; as-recorded recovered grade ≈ 6,690 g/t Ag (215 oz/t) (NSW Dept of Mines Annual Report 1898, p.68, in R00002143)	Government production record; corroborated in tenor by the 1993 stockpile sampling below. No tonnage or grade recorded for the 1970s–80s open-cut mining.
Rock chip BB10 (1993, ore stockpile): 9,190 g/t Ag and 11.0 g/t Au (ALS certificate ST7172)	Petrographically confirmed — native silver ± ?dyscrasite in a pyritic hydrothermal breccia (Ashley, UNE). Certificate values used where the field ledger differs marginally (Au 11.3 g/t ledger vs 11.0 g/t certificate; discrepancy disclosed in the synthesis, §4.2).
Drill hole BPD6, 38–39 m: Ag 39 / 40 ppm, Au 0.14 / 0.13 g/t, Pb 294 / 260 ppm, Zn 334 / 300 ppm — single-metre RC, within logged pyrite-silver veins at 37–40 m (ALS ST13539; R00002143)	Independently confirmed — reproduced across original and resplit samples (BD179 / BD193; Ag relative difference 3%). The most reliable drill intercept in the dataset.
Drill hole BPD3, 47–48 m: Ag 58 / 80 ppm, Zn 888 / 1,060 ppm across two splits (BD101 / BD195), within a logged pyrite-silver vein at 47–47.5 m (ALS ST13539; R00002143)	Disclosed split discrepancy (Ag relative difference ≈ 32%) — both split values reported, per the synthesis; the source's averaged figure is not used. Phase 1 twinned and duplicated re-sampling with certified reference materials quantifies the split heterogeneity.

Drill values are single-metre, halo-tenor RC samples reported as vectors to the untested shoots, not as resource-grade results. One anomalous gold value (BD165: 0.77 g/t certificate primary vs 0.09 g/t log, discordant checks) is excluded pending manual verification (synthesis Appendix E).

Exploration history — every phase found silver; the exits are documented

Period · operator (licence) · model targeted · documented departure reason
1898	Claverie & Nelmes workings	Native-silver lode mining	Production recorded (NSW Dept of Mines AR 1898); closure not documented in the open file
late 1970s–80s	Mining-title holders (open cut)	Direct-smelting silver ore to Port Kembla	Unprofitable — high-grade lode diluted by altered host rock, with no reliable grade control of bulk shipments (R00002143, §4). Economic / operational exit
1993	Danamore (Coverdale tenement)	Dump and stockpile reconnaissance	Advanced — strongly anomalous silver confirmed in stockpiled lode material (ALS ST7172); licence application followed
1995	M H Coverdale JV Pacific Arc Exploration (EL 4845)	Gridding and costeaning to locate the lode	Advanced to drilling — costeans located the lode and a 15 m alteration zone; halo-tenor assays (ALS ST13353)
1995–96	Pacific Arc / Slade Drilling (EL 4845)	Continuity of bonanza-grade silver at depth — six scout RC holes + pre-collar, 307 m	Relinquishment recommended on low silver assays, assessed against the bonanza-continuity benchmark alone; the polymetallic result was not followed up (English 1996, GS1996/324, R00002143). Model-benchmark exit

Why the grade is still available — on the documented record

Wrong commodity benchmark, wrong deposit model. The 1996 report summary framed the prospect against the disseminated, low-sulphide intrusion-related gold style (Timbarra) and judged the drilling against a single benchmark — continuity of bonanza-grade native silver at depth — recommending relinquishment when the six holes returned tens-of-ppm silver (English 1996, R00002143). The company's own petrographic appendix, however, describes a sulphide-rich (≈ 5 vol %) tetrahedrite–galena–sphalerite–chalcopyrite–native-silver ± ?dyscrasite assemblage that matches the Webbs / Conrad polymetallic silver-lode class the same report cites as a contrast. The exit is documented as a benchmark decision, not a sterility finding: the holes were appropriately oriented and did intersect the lode — the defensible criticism is that there were too few of them, drilled too shallow and too widely spaced (≈ 20–50 m) to resolve plunging high-grade shoots, and that the results were screened on silver alone (synthesis §5.1).

The analytical gap. The 1995 drill samples were assayed for Cu, Pb, Zn, Ag, As, Bi, Mo, Sb and Au only. Tin, tungsten and indium — the speciality-metal tail carried by the Webbs / Conrad class — were never measured in any historical sample (ALS ST13539; R00002143). Independent pathfinders support the polymetallic reading: arsenic to 1,170 ppm, decoupled from silver–lead and readily accommodated in the tetrahedrite–tennantite series the petrography describes, and molybdenum to 27 ppm. Whether a Sn–W–In credit exists is an open question the historical record cannot answer; re-assay of surviving material either adds the credit or closes the question.

The untested target. The high-grade shoots that produced the 1898 ore and the 1980s open cut have not yet been tested at depth: six scattered scout RC holes on ≈ 20–50 m spacing sampled the disseminated alteration halo rather than the shoots, to only ≈ 45 m vertical, and the drill logs record pyrite-silver veins at 37–40 m (BPD6) and 47–47.5 m (BPD3) at the limit of that drilling. No follow-up programme was recommended or actioned — the ground lapsed with the polymetallic result standing, and the open-hole percussion method itself is prone to smearing and diluting narrow high-grade veins into the halo it reported (Drill Programme Design v1.0, §2.2). 

The miss, precisely. The grade is not "still available" because nobody looked — it is still available because the one modern test could not have found it. Six shallow, widely-spaced (≈ 20–50 m) open-hole RC holes sampled the disseminated alteration halo to only ≈ 45 m vertical; none was positioned to intersect a plunging high-grade shoot, the method itself smears narrow veins into the halo it reports, and the results were then judged against a single benchmark — continuity of bonanza-grade silver — under a deposit model the company's own petrography contradicts, with the class's Sn–W–In tail never assayed. The 1996 programme answered a question about the halo; the shoots at depth were never asked (English 1996, R00002143; synthesis §5.1).

System scale and the 2026 price lens

Footprint (dimensions, not tonnes). Interpreted lode corridor of at least 450 m (the open cut plus ≈ 350 m of old workings to the north), of which only ≈ 50–100 m of strike has been drill-tested; alteration zone 15–20 m wide; depth tested ≈ 45 m vertical (level-datum assumption) in a model class whose type deposits are reported open at depth and along strike. Model-class analogues — attributed to the class, not the project. Published comparative figures, cited in the synthesis as deposit-style context only and not as a guide to tonnage or grade at Basket Swamp (for which no resource estimate exists), place Webbs at the order of 2.2 Mt at ≈ 205 g/t AgEq and Conrad at ≈ 3.33 Mt at ≈ 193 g/t AgEq (Hobby 2010; Rapid Critical Metals 2026). The synthesis's conservative alternative is stated on equal footing: the high-grade silver may be confined to small, largely mined-out surface pods with limited depth continuity — a reading at least as well-supported by the present facts, and the question the primary target must resolve (§5.6). The price lens — the synthesis author's commercial argument; context only, no recovery, mining or processing costs applied, not attributed to any historical operator. The synthesis back-calculates an indicative, illustrative in-situ AgEq for the two best intervals at mid-2026 prices: BPD3 47–48 m ≈ 92 g/t AgEq and BPD6 39–40 m ≈ 76 g/t AgEq — characterised in the synthesis as approximately double the single-element silver value the 1996 programme screened on, while noting that even on this 100 %-recovery basis the halo intervals are sub-resource-grade over 1 m; the shoots are the separate, untested proposition (§5.5; Appendix B).

The targets

T1 — down-plunge continuation of the historic high-grade shoots (primary). The known limitation is stated plainly: no primary geometric evidence of a coherent plunging shoot exists on the property — no level plans, stope records or surveyed workings — so the target rests on grade evidence, and the shoot-plunge reconstruction may not be achievable from the available data. The designed resolution: Stage 0 georeferencing and structural mapping of the open cut and workings (the near-free kill test), then oriented diamond holes BSD001 (120 m) and BSD002 (200 m) on the central section, cutting the lode 50–150 m below surface. T2 — the polymetallic lode envelope at depth and along strike: BPD3 and BPD6 treated as vectors, not failures; step-outs BSD006–BSD007 (150 m each) beneath the northern old workings. T3 — the Sn–W–In speciality tail (conceptual): never analysed; resolved by full-suite re-assay, not drilling. T4 — parallel / blind structures: two parallel alteration zones noted in the 1996 holes; tested by BSD008 (180 m), west of the main lode.

Testing the thesis — gates, kill criteria, cost to answer

Phase + cost · scope · gate and kill criterion
Phase 1 / Stage 0 — ≈ A$40–90k (synthesis §6.3; drill design Stage 0 A$25–45k)	Tenure to grant, Forestry Corporation access pathway, native-title condition scoping; georeference source Figure 2 and DGPS pickup; shoot-plunge reconstruction; conditional full-suite re-assay incl. Sn–W–In (≈ 206 surviving samples at ≈ A$45–70 each ≈ A$10–15k, if rejects survive); As–Sb penalty-element, metallurgical and AMD desktop screens	Gated kill-or-advance, not confirmatory. The kill answer for the shoot model is near-free and binary: if a defensible plunge cannot be reconstructed, the primary play is dead and the thesis re-frames to the conservative shallow-pod case. If rejects have not survived, the Sn–W–In question is re-costed via fresh costean / twin-RC sampling — a re-framing, not a zero outcome
Stage 1 drilling (conditional) — central case ≈ A$630k (indicative A$530–730k)	≈ 8 diamond holes / ≈ 1,250 m per Drill Programme Design v1.0, led by BSD001 (120 m) and BSD002 (200 m) on Target 1. QAQC: certified reference materials in an Ag–Pb–Zn matrix, blanks, field and laboratory duplicates at ≈ 1-in-20, umpire checks and ore-grade Ag methods for over-limits — designed against the documented 1995 split heterogeneity	Proceeds only on Stage 0 delivering a refined 3-D target and final collar plan, with “a go / no-go decision before any rig mobilises” (Drill Programme Design v1.0, §4); Stage 1 logging, assays and sections then gate a go / no-go decision to Stage 2
Stage 2 step-out (contingent) — scope and budget set by the Stage 1 outcome	Strike and depth step-outs along the ≈ 450 m corridor toward scoping-level drill density, with oriented / metallurgical core	Not committed; contingent on a positive Stage 1 result (Drill Programme Design v1.0, §6)

Technical Manager: Dr Tim McConachy FAusIMM (1974), Senior Fellow SEG, former Rio Tinto Chief Geologist.

Data room (under NDA): technical synthesis v4.1, Phase 1 drill programme design, source register and figure set.

Contact: Doug Alcock, Managing Director, CAADIA Metals Pty Ltd — dalcock@caadiametals.com.au

No JORC (2012) Mineral Resource, Ore Reserve or Exploration Target is declared or implied. Historical results are compiled from GSNSW open-file (DIGS) records, have not been verified by a Competent Person for public reporting, and are provided for context only. The IRGS / distal-replacement interpretation is a working hypothesis under test; alternative interpretations of the geophysical data exist. Earn-in terms are indicative and non-binding, subject to contract, due diligence and grant of the Exploration Licence.