Kalamazoo Resources (ASX:KZR) has consolidated a 1,574km2 exploration position at its Mt Piper Gold Project in Central Victoria, following granting of new tenements.
The recently granted Seymour and Hughes Creek exploration licences provide continuous coverage over a 15km prospective structural corridor. The corridor extends through the Whiteheads Hill target, where first-pass aircore drilling has confirmed in situ gold-antimony anomalism.
The company now holds 1,179km2 of granted exploration tenure and a further 395km2 under application. The project lies within the same geological setting as major gold-antimony systems including Fosterville, Costerfield, Nagambie, and Sunday Creek.
Reconnaissance aircore drilling at Whiteheads Hill returned results of up to 155 parts per million (ppm) antimony (Sb) and 68 parts per billion (ppb) gold (Au) from a 15-hole program totalling 328m. Drilling confirmed a 3m zone exceeding 100ppm Sb within a broader anomalous interval associated with a west-dipping structure.
While the results are early stage and sub-economic, they validate the presence of a hydrothermal system along the interpreted 15km structural corridor, which has seen limited effective historical exploration.
Exploration Director Ben Ackerman says the early reconnaissance results affirm the company’s view that Mt Piper represents a broader regional opportunity rather than a collection of isolated prospects.
“Securing and expanding this tenure gives us a significant opportunity to systematically explore for new ‘high-grade’ gold and gold-antimony deposits in a region with clear geological analogues to major Victorian systems,” Ackerman notes.
The Whiteheads Hill prospect is east of Seymour and about 20km south of the Nagambie antimony-gold mine, along a north-south trending faulted contact within Devonian sedimentary rocks.
Building the target pipeline
With the Whiteheads Hill corridor now secured, Kalamazoo is advancing reconnaissance across the broader Mt Piper tenure, where earlier-stage work has identified additional targets for systematic follow-up.
Reconnaissance programs at Cunninghams and Kurkuruk have identified additional targets associated with historical workings, quartz veining, and coherent gold-antimony-arsenic geochemistry.
At Cunninghams, soil geochemistry has defined a strong gold-antimony-arsenic response extending from known mineralisation. This links with historical alluvial workings, where previous explorers reported rock chips up to 21 grams per tonne Au and more than 1% Sb.
Recent rock chip sampling at Kurkuruk confirmed mineralisation over at least 670m of strike, with peak assays of 3.2g/t Au, 1,428ppm Sb, and 1,949ppm arsenic.
CEO Andrew McDougall says Kalamazoo has assembled a significant wholly controlled position across an underexplored part of Victoria’s highly endowed gold-antimony region. He explains that the opportunity is to convert that into a “disciplined pipeline of drill targets”.
“Mt Piper provides Kalamazoo with a meaningful longer-term discovery platform alongside the company’s primary development focus at Ashburton,” McDougall adds.
The next exploration phase will integrate hyperspectral imagery, high-resolution airborne gravity gradiometry, geochemistry, and structural interpretation. The aim is to rank high-conviction targets for staged drill testing.
Kalamazoo considers antimony increasingly significant given its classification as a critical mineral.
Kalamazoo Resources is an Australian explorer and developer whose flagship Ashburton Gold Project in Western Australia hosts a 1.44-million-ounce resource across the Mt Olympus, Peake, Waugh, and Zeus deposits.
Write to JC Villarba at Mining.com.au
Main image: Kalamazoo Resources
