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

Three majors drilled Back Creek. None of them tested it for silver or gold. Between 1979 and 1995, BHP, Kennecott/Shell and WMC explored this ground under a tin-only model, found sub-economic tin, and walked away. Their drill core, soils and rock chips are all in the open file — and modern re-examination shows the record is not a closed question. It's an incomplete one. Every historic drill hole was assayed for the tin-era suite. Gold, bismuth and tellurium were never determi