Wishbone Gold granted additional land by Queensland government

Wishbone Gold announced on Thursday that the Queensland state government in Australia had accepted its proposal to take on additional land under the current Wishbone II EPM.

The AIM-traded firm described it as the “latest addition” to the Wishbone Project, coming on the back of the recent renewal of the adjoining EPM 18396 for five years.

It said the project now consisted of 54 sub-blocks, totalling 174 square kilometres of “highly prospective” ground in the Charters Towers-Ravenswood district, which the board described as north Queensland's “premier” gold province.

Key exploration targets included intrusive-related gold systems, which are associated with breccias and regarded as having high-level sub-volcanic, or porphyry, affinities, such as at Mt Leyshon, and Ravenswood-Mt Wright.

It was also targeting granite-hosted vein and alteration systems similar to the nearby Ravenswood district, where the total gold field had an endowment of five million to seven million ounces of gold.

Granite-hosted mesothermal gold veins were being targeted as well, which are often classed as ‘plutonic’, such as at Charters Towers, but also included the nearby Hadleigh Castle mine and Rishton Mine Corridor.

Encouragement for the targets was developed from the presence of a number of known gold mineral occurrences and old gold mines within the sub-blocks of EPM 27757, including the Himalaya North Extended and City of Melbourne historic mines, the Wishbone board explained.

Wishbone Gold and Terra Search's development of a new copper mineralisation style for the district was demonstrated at the Halo prospect within Wishbone II EPM 18396.

Greisen and vein-hosted copper was associated with the roof zones of mineralised intrusives in the area, and the firm said it could represent the core of a mineralising fluid pathway that extended outwards into gold-bearing zones.

The reprocessing of regional geophysical data sets undertaken during desktop studies related to Wishbone’s assessment of the district identified several distinct magnetic anomalies, which were underexplored in terms of follow-up ground magnetic coverage as well as and surface geochemical sampling.

“We are excited to acquire a block such as this, considering how paradoxically underexplored the region has been, given its gold-copper endowment,” said chairman Richard Poulden.

“Technology has come a long way in the last few years, and we look forward to continuing to grow with it.

“With Wishbone II having the same geological make up as the five million ounce Ravenswood deposit, we are looking forward to starting the drill programme.”

At 1144 BST, shares in Wishbone Gold were down 0.51% at 9.75p.