The Moolook Project, far western NSW, 180 km north of Broken Hill. Three untested magnetic bodies sit on a single basin-bounding structure — the terrane boundary between the Curnamona margin and the Bancannia Trough — with a mineralised water bore on the same structure between them. Base: GSNSW magnetics. The one-sentence case Three large magnetic bodies sit on a basin-bounding fault under about 500 m of cover, and the only hole ever drilled on that fault — a government water

"Silurian volcanic belt between the Woodlawn and Captains Flat mines" In 1974, Western Mining Corporation mapped a gossan and IP anomaly along a 2.3 km corridor at Clare, drilled four shallow diamond holes, hit sulphide in both drilled sections, and then left. Nobody has drilled there since. No hole went deeper than about 90 m vertical. CAADIA Metals now holds the ground as granted Exploration Licence 9943 (25 August 2026), covering the whole Bungendore Corridor. Figure: clar

A 50 m historical adit on the eastern slope of Balcombe Hill exposes chalcopyrite–sphalerite–galena mineralisation in a fragmental volcanic host. Teck Explorations cut ten channels in it in 1981, and all ten are mineralised: 0.42–1.14 % Cu, up to 2.1 % Zn and up to 25 g/t Ag. Geological Survey of NSW grab samples returned up to 1.96 % Cu, 7.52 % Zn and 33.9 g/t Ag. In more than a century, no drill hole has been collared at the workings or drilled beneath them. Figure 1 —...

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 miner

Balladonia is a nickel–copper–PGE, copper–gold and rare-earth target on the buried south-eastern margin of the Albany–Fraser Orogen — the orogen that hosts Nova–Bollinger — under some of the thinnest Eucla Basin cover anywhere on the belt's eastern run: about 37 m. The target has already been drilled, once. In 2011 Enterprise Metals put a single EIS co-funded hole (BLRCD007) into the centre of a ~2,300 m circular magnetic anomaly that is coincident with a ~9 mGal residual Bou

Titan is a copper–gold–bismuth target in the Fraser Range of Western Australia — the same belt, and the same operator, as the Nova–Bollinger nickel–copper–cobalt mine. This target has already been drilled: in 2021 IGO put a single 634 m diamond hole (21AFDD201) straight through it under the Government's Exploration Incentive Scheme. But IGO drilled it for a Nova‑style magmatic nickel sulphide body, found no nickel — and in doing so cored a coherent copper–gold–bismuth signal

"Some ground is judged by the assays that were run. Better ground is judged by the assays that weren't." The Birdwood field, 35 miles east of Wauchope in the upper Hastings of northern New South Wales, is now held under Exploration Licence 9090 by Meta Minerals Pty Ltd (ACN 634 190 060). It sits in the western Hastings Block of the southern New England Orogen — Lower Devonian to Lower Permian shales, greywackes, sandstones and tuffs, intruded by an Upper Permian Trondhjemite

Some exploration licences are interesting because of what has been found on them. EL8810, in the Coolabah–Girilambone district about 45 km west-north-west of Nyngan, is interesting because of what was sampled but never finished on it — and that makes it one of the cleaner case studies we've worked through in this series. The licence forms the northern part of Aeris Resources' Tritton Operations package, held through Tritton Resources Pty Ltd. It was pegged deliberately: to co

Every so often a piece of ground rewards a second reading — not because the people who hold it have missed anything, but because the questions we ask of a dataset change with the commodity cycle. EL6419 "Hillgrove Regional," held by Hillgrove Mines Pty Ltd and beneficially owned by Larvotto Resources Limited (ASX: LRV), is one of those pieces of ground. This is a forensic re-read of the in-licence open-file record for EL6419 — the shallow historic drilling and the modern rock

Every so often a piece of ground rewards the person who reads its file carefully rather than the person who simply walks it. The Pambula goldfield on the far south coast of New South Wales — held today under Exploration Licence 9833 by Rox-ex Pty Ltd, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Crossroads Gold Corp (TSXV: CRG) — is one of those places. Pambula is a low-sulphidation epithermal gold–silver system hosted in the bimodal Boyd Volcanic Complex, sitting at the southern end of

Ashford is the only true mining-style coal in this dataset: a mapped, discrete Permian coal-measure belt hosting NSW's historic Ashford colliery, and one of the very few workable Permian coking-coal occurrences anywhere north of the Hunter. The coal is real, shallow and outcropping — the Early Permian Ashford Coal Measures form a narrow, north-north-east-trending strip that has been drilled repeatedly since 1979 and mined historically, yet never systematically tested along it

Some deposits are under-explored because nobody found them. Piedmont is the rarer case: a deposit everyone found, and nobody ever assayed. Roughly 28–30 km SSW of Bingara, near the Gwydir River on the Cobbadah 9037-IV-S sheet, the Piedmont Magnesite Mine sits in the schistose serpentinite of the Great Serpentinite Belt, hard against the Peel Fault system. The Geological Survey of NSW called it "the only documented metahydrothermally-derived magnesite deposit in the sheet area

Across nearly seventy years and a dozen wells, no operator ever placed a modern, undamaged completion across proven pay. Hogarth 2 flowed half a million cubic feet a day through a packer that wouldn't seat and stabilised at 120 Mcf/d behind measured 50% formation damage; Hogarth 1's best log zones were never tested because all four packers failed; Clifden 1 was abandoned 200 feet short of its target when the hole caved; Cedar Point-1's only permeability test ended when the pa

The Miss: the single most anomalous rock chip in fifty years of district data — coincident gold, silver, arsenic, antimony and lead on a proven mineralised horizon — was logged as the "southern limit of sampling" in 1997, left behind while the crew moved north, and has sat untested on vacant ground ever since

Every company that explored this ground walked away. When we went back through fifty years of open-file records, page by page, we found that three of those exits were premature: a drill hole that ended in zinc, abandoned when the rig lost air; gold that was assayed but never reported; a high-grade gossan whose likely source geometry was never drilled. The core from these holes is still in the state core library. The setting Talagandra sits on the same Silurian volcanic belt a

The short version Coopers-Curraba was worked, sampled and drilled three times between 1883 and 1969 — for copper and for sulphur — and abandoned each time on copper economics, not geology. The 1968 operator assayed his drill core for gold and never interpreted the results. Read now, those logs show gold sitting outside the copper lode: above it, and again below it, with the deeper hole ending inside a gold-bearing arsenopyrite zone at 79.4 m. Then, in 1987, a different explor

Every operator who drilled Mt Edith hit gold. None drilled below 150 metres. None drilled the antimony. And the two most competent — CRA in 1989 and Alphadale in 1997 — each wrote down the deeper test and left before running it. That is the whole opportunity in three sentences. What follows is why we think it's real, and why it's still open. What the historic record shows The best hole on the property, ME52 (Alphadale, 1997), cut 14 m @ 1.26 g/t Au from 30 m — including 4 m @

In 1967 the Electrolytic Zinc Company ran a dipole–dipole IP survey across a range of low hills west of Port Macquarie. What came back was a chargeable body more than three miles long. EZ described it as the largest and most intense IP anomaly then found in Australia. Nine operators followed over the next forty-three years. Between them they proved the system makes grade — 15.30 % Zn in HR4, 4.62 % Cu and 150 g/t Ag in MC1. Not one of them put a diamond hole into the stronges

Basket Swamp is a historic high-grade silver mine in northern NSW that produced bonanza-grade ore from 1888 to 1910 and was open-cut mined in the 1970s–80s — yet the lode itself has never been properly drilled. The structure can be traced for at least 450 metres at surface, but only 50–100 metres of it has ever seen a drill hole, and nothing has been tested below about 45 metres depth. The only drilling ever done on the prospect — six shallow scout holes in 1995–96 — was judg

A granite–marble contact in the New England Orogen, worked for iron and then limestone since 1939 — and never once tested for the metals a contact skarn actually carries. The magnetic body at the historic workings has never been drilled. The two tests that would settle it are cheap. The setup. The Permian Bruxner Park Adamellite intrudes a marble–metasediment sequence and marmorises the carbonate at its contact — a textbook contact-skarn setting. A 1989 NSW Government study i