Ashburton Project

The Ashburton project consists of one granted mining lease and three contiguous exploration licence applications covering a combined area of approximately 970 square kilometres.

The Company’s knowledge of the local geology is based on coarse 1,600 metre spaced regional aeromagnetic survey data, and preliminary interpretations of Landsat and Aster data with limited ground proofing.  However, two deposits in particular, Paulsen’s and the Mt Clement gold-copper prospect, confirm the prospectivity of the area and serve to illustrate the types of deposit that occur in the region, and suggest a model for future exploration.

The high grade Paulsen’s gold deposit is approximately 60 kilometres north of the Company’s tenements on the edge of the Wyloo Dome and has combined resources of 1.4 million tonnes at 11.7 g/t for 540,000 ounces of gold.  Mt Clement is 20 kilometres to the northwest of Athena’s ground and contains Indicated Resources of 818,000 tonnes grading 2.7 g/t gold, for 71,000 ounces of contained gold.  The copper-gold mineralisation at Mt Clement also has silver credits in the order of 30 g/t. The Paulsen’s and Mt Clement deposits prove that the district is prospective for both small high-grade and large low-grade copper-gold deposits.

Approximately 3,600 tonnes of lead and 950 kilogram’s of silver was produced between 1948 and 1959 from abandoned mines at Kooline on the Company’s tenements.  The production came from about twenty small high-grade mines, but 65% of the production came from the Gift, June-Audrey and Belrose mines. Historically, channel samples from the underground workings have returned results up to 20% lead and 100 ppm silver from quartz veins up to 2 metres thick.

The sub-vertical veins at Kooline occur in multiple stacked and en echelon sets over several kilometres of strike.  The width of veins ranges from 0.5 to 2 metres thick.  No evidence of drilling was seen at any of the mines visited by the Company’s geologists.  The vein hosted lead-silver mineralisation at Kooline is associated with mesothermal quartz veins on shears in siltstone and greywackes, and is probably related to the intrusion of the Boolaloo Granite.

In addition the known lead mineralisation very encouraging gold and copper assays have been obtained from past exploration within the Company’s tenement area. 

Rock chip samples collected from Kooline North on M08/189 by a prospector reportedly returned peak assays of 1270g/t gold, 17 g/t gold with 36% Copper, and 13 g/t gold. Taipan Resources are reported to have drilled 16 holes for a total of 1684 metres to test narrow gossanous quartz veins hosted by siltstone at this location.   The best result were intersections of 4 metres at 1.2 g/t gold and 4 metres 0.45 g/t gold from separate drill holes.

Newmont Holdings Pty Ltd conducted a stream sediment sampling programme in 1982 which delineated a number of anomalies up to 0.17ppm gold and 1230ppm lead.  Golden Deeps Pty Ltd carried out rock sampling in conjunction with limited ground magnetic, soil geochemical programmes and 1:10,000 scale geological mapping in the late 1980’s.  The best result was 38g/t gold, which was accompanied by assays in the range of 0.10 and 1.10 g/t gold from a quartz vein west of Kooline.  Golden Deeps also got anomalous arsenic, copper, zinc and silver results in high grade lead samples from the mines.

Newmont’s 1982 survey was followed up by Aberfoyle Resources Ltd Between 1990 and 1994.  Trenching at the Sunken Treasure and Banana prospects returned 2 metres at 13.3g/t gold, but subsequent follow up sampling failed to confirm this result, suggesting a pronounced nugget effect, which was also reported by Golden Deeps, and is often found in high-grade samples.  Aberfoyle carried out further stream sediment sampling that identified a weak coherent gold anomaly in drainages 4 kilometres northeast of the Kooline lead mines, but did no work to follow this up.

Greenstone Resources NL and Oakborough Pty Ltd drill tested anomalies identified by Aberfoyle outside of Athena’s tenement between 1998 and 2001.  The best results were 5 metres at 2.45g/t gold, 2 metres at 2.35g/t gold and 3 metres at 0.53 g/t gold.  Newmont’s and Aberfoyle’s anomalies on Athena’s tenements require further evaluation.

The gold and base metal mineralisation in the Ashburton region is strongly zoned around granites in the Gascoyne Complex.   Copper-gold mineralisation occurs closest to the granite while silver-lead mineralisation occurs further out. This pattern is similar to the metal zonation observed around granites in other mineral fields, for example Cullen Batholith at Pine Creek in the Northern Territory and the Heemskirk Granite in the Zeehan district of Tasmania. The aeromagnetic and gravity surveys indicate the possible location of several smaller buried granitic intrusions within the Company’s tenements at Kooline.

Targeting and Exploration

• Largely exposed terrain allowing the use of satellite data to identify rock types and alteration,

• Well developed regolith amenable to both geochemical and geophysical exploration,

• Remote Sensing techniques using multispectral satellite and radiometric data have been shown work at both Ravensthorpe and Ashburton when used in conjunction with high-resolution aeromagnetics.

• Geophysical methods such as EM and IP will also be important tools for location sulphide mineralisation at Kooline ahead of drilling.