ELA7078 WOWINGRAGONG - Concealed Macquarie Arc Copper Target
Updated: 8 hours ago
In 1990–91, BHP Gold and Newcrest drilled 13 shallow aircore holes into concealed Macquarie Arc basement south of Forbes. They were looking for gold, assayed five elements, found no gold, and left. Their own lab sheets also recorded copper and zinc that nobody interpreted. Thirty-five years on, no one has drilled it again.
CAADIA Metals holds the ground under application ELA7078, which has reached a Notice of Proposed Decision. The block covers 16 units, 8–12 km south-south-west of Forbes, in the concealed Junee–Narromine Volcanic Belt, the same arc that hosts Cowal and Northparkes.
What the drilling found
Hole F9: copper at 100–180 ppm through the lower 20 m of an 88 m hole, with zinc stepping up four to five times to 150–260 ppm. Lead and arsenic stay low.
Hole F12: zinc at 115–180 ppm with arsenic, from just 3 m below surface.
Gold: absent (≤0.05 g/t).
Background elsewhere: ten of the thirteen holes sit at background throughout. The signal is confined to a few holes.
Hole F9: copper, zinc and lead down the hole, redrawn from the original laboratory sheets. The zinc rise between about 72 and 85 m was never interpreted by the 1991 operator.
Why it was never followed up
The 1991 programme was scored on gold alone. The copper–zinc didn't fit that model, so it stayed on the shelf. Later explorers chased gold targets elsewhere or reviewed the ground on the desktop. The most recent holder gave it up in 2025 over land access, not geology. No hole has been drilled for base metals, and none has gone deeper than 51 m into basement.
The 1991 gravity survey georeferenced for the first time, with all 13 holes (circle size = maximum zinc) and the 2024 soils. The drilling sits in a north-north-east zone of steep gravity gradients. The best hole, F9, lies outside the surveyed area (hatched), so its relationship to the feature has never been measured.
South-west to north-east section through all 13 holes. Cover is 3–39 m, and each hole stopped within about 50 m of the top of basement. The zinc anomalism (red) is in F12, F3 and F9.
The honest case against
The gravity feature may be a dense but barren diorite; that rock type underlies part of the district. No sulphide, alteration or intrusive rock was logged. Every sample is an oxidised chip. The F9 anomaly falls back to background over its last three samples. On present data, nothing here is confirmed mineralisation.
Why it's still worth testing
The counter-argument and the target cost the same to resolve: one RC twin of F9 to about 150 m, with modern multi-element assays, for tens of thousands of dollars, not millions. It sits in a first-order copper–gold belt, near a mapped structural intersection, on ground that has never been tested for the commodity that matters. The question is cheap, the address is first-order and the upside is asymmetric.
Available under NDA
The Wowingragong Technical Synthesis (v9.0) was written for a geologist deciding whether to fund the next step or walk away. It includes:
a 9-page investment case, with evidence for and against weighted side by side
all 202 basement assays, re-verified against the original laboratory sheets (the only digital copy; GSNSW holds none)
collars in MGA94, the georeferenced gravity, and soil and geophysics compilations
a costed test programme, with explicit advance and kill criteria for each step
an independent technical review, reproduced unedited
No JORC (2012) Mineral Resource, Ore Reserve or Exploration Target is declared or implied. Historical results come from GSNSW open-file records, have not been verified by a Competent Person, and are ppm-level geochemistry, not mineralised intersections. Cowal and Northparkes are cited for geological context only. ELA7078 is an application; grant is pending.
