ELA7081 Wisdom — Two Operators Found 0.82 g/t Gold at Surface. Then They Drilled the Footwall and Left.
Updated: 2 days ago
Between 1990 and 1995, three exploration teams walked over the Wisdom Prospect near Forbes. Two of them independently found gold at surface — up to 0.82 g/t Au in a coherent arsenic–antimony–tungsten halo. Then the drill rigs were pointed into the diorite underneath the mineralisation, assayed for the wrong elements on coarse composites, and the ground was handed back. The high-grade gold has never been drilled to depth. Not once.
This isn't a grassroots concept. It's a mineralised system that was found, confirmed into bedrock, and then abandoned for reasons the open-file record lays out plainly — a change of exploration model, not a drill result.
The concept in one paragraph
Wisdom is the exposed distal edge of an intrusion-related gold system: a silicified, quartz-veined corridor carrying gold and a full pathfinder suite at surface, sitting on a diorite that the original petrologist read as the margin of a buried intrusive centre. The gold sits in the corridor. Every historical hole tested the footwall beneath it, or the cover beside it — never the corridor itself.
The miss, in one picture
Figure 1. What was tested, and what wasn't. The five 1991 percussion holes were angled into the diorite footwall (26–42 m); the silicified corridor beneath the best surface gold was never intersected. The 29 northern RAB holes stopped at the top of bedrock. The deep magnetic source has never been drilled. 34 holes, and not one tested the high-grade gold at depth. Historical, non-JORC.
Why the gold is still there — and how you can check it yourself
Three documented reasons, all in the NSW GSNSW open-file (DiGS) record:
Wrong rock. Holes were collared to test down-dip into diorite, below and around the surface gold — the operator's own sections say so.
Wrong elements, wrong intervals. Drilling was assayed for gold and arsenic only, on 4 m composites — blind to narrow, structurally-focused gold. No mercury, thallium, silver or tungsten. No core was kept.
Wrong model. When shallow holes came back gold-poor, the operator abandoned the gold target and chased a buried porphyry instead — then relinquished.
You don't have to take our word for any of it. Pull the reports yourself: GSNSW DiGS R00004920, R00004921, R00004922 (Newmont/Newcrest 1990–92), R00002219 and R00002708 (Delta Gold / TriOrigin 1995–96). The drill collars and geochemistry are all in MinView.
It's real, and it's reproduced — now on real coordinates
Figure 2. First georeferenced compilation of every historical sample. Two independent operators recorded gold on the same outcrop: Newmont/Newcrest's 0.82 g/t Au (FEL-023) and Delta/TriOrigin's 0.168 g/t re-sample sit ~165 m apart on the Wisdom corridor (GDA94 / MGA Zone 55). The system also carries into fresh rock — down-hole arsenic to 1,750 ppm in percussion. Historical, non-JORC.
There's more than one target — and one of them is deep
Figure 3. Magnetic imagery over the licence. A ~2 km body through the centre of the ground is suppressed in the first vertical derivative (nothing shallow) but persists after 250 m upward continuation — a deep source, consistent with the operator's "buried intrusive at ~1 km" note. Screen imagery, unmodelled.
Three ranked targets:
The Wisdom corridor — drill the 0.82 g/t surface gold to vertical depth, with modern multi-element assaying, for the first time.
A blind northern target under >30 m of cover — historical RAB clipped it and returned 0.056 g/t Au / 3 m (open at 62 m) with a barium–arsenic halo.
The deep intrusive source — imaged in 1990, never modelled, never drilled.
For scale, the Calarie gold deposit (≈531,000 t @ 3 g/t Au) lies about 6 km east-south-east, in the same district that hosts Northparkes.
Where we've got to
CAADIA Metals has compiled and georeferenced the entire historical dataset — 34 collars, 263 surface samples — and reduced the play to a short, staged, cheaply-testable programme: desktop and geophysical modelling first, drilling only once targets are drill-ready. Our own independent technical review ranks Wisdom first of our fifteen NSW projects.
Take a look — then talk to us
If you run your own reinterpretation: everything above is verifiable in GSNSW DiGS and MinView using the report numbers listed. We'd rather you check it than trust us.
If you'd like the full picture: the Wisdom Technical Synthesis — the georeferenced database, the target-by-target drill logic, the deposit-model analysis and the staged programme — is available under a one-page mutual NDA.
No JORC (2012) Mineral Resource, Ore Reserve or Exploration Target is declared or implied. All results are historical, 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 intrusion-related interpretation is a working hypothesis under test.
