"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 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