The Company’s Project is located largely enveloped by tenements held by its major shareholder and previous joint venture partner, St Ives. The St Ives gold operations have run continuously since inception when still part of the then WMC owned Kambalda Nickel Operations in 1980, with the first gold mined at Kambalda/St Ives being specimen stone at the Fisher, Hunt and Lunnon Nickel mines to the immediate south of the Kambalda township followed by recognition of gold mineralisation in the Victory, Orchin and Ives Reward areas on the south side of Lake Lefroy.
Open pit mining commenced at the Victory complex in 1981, just 1,500 metres north of the Project’s boundary, moving to underground development of the Victory-Defiance system shortly thereafter. The deeper parts of this underground mine, termed Conqueror, are less than 250 metres to the north of the Project.
In 1987 a dedicated gold processing facility was commissioned in the locality of the Company’s Jan Shaft Nickel Mine and called St Ives, whilst following purchase of the assets from WMC in 2001, Gold Fields Ltd built a new 4.8 mtpa facility to the north of the Project on the south shore of Lake Lefroy in 2005, termed the Lefroy Plant.
Gold discoveries continued to occur throughout the district and to the immediate south of the Project the Argo-Apollo-Hamlet-Athena camp of gold deposits evolved from first discovery in 1994 (Argo) through to the present day with Hamlet underground continuing in production.
The area has benefited from extensive prior geophysical surveys allowing the Company’s technical staff to complete a detailed review and analysis of the litho-structural framework that hosts both the nickel and the gold mineralisation, based on this holistic view of the comprehensive database coupled with their own direct personal experience on the Project and at St Ives. As a consequence, the Company has now been able to generate new surficial gold anomalism in its exploration work, during the period prior to IPO and compiled a portfolio of empirical and conceptual targets that it considers warrant aggressive testing.
1920s vintage stoping on quartz vein structure 
1920s vintage stoping on laminated quartz vein with wood stull supports