Flynn Gold is one of the only explorers targeting high-grade gold in the Apple Isle.

Despite its small size, Tasmania is well-endowed when it comes to minerals. The state has known deposits of gold, iron ore, nickel, tin, zinc, lead and copper.

“A lot of people don’t realise that about 65% of Tasmania’s export earnings come from minerals, and so it’s a very big deal down there,” Flynn managing director Neil Marston said.

“Tasmania is open for business as far as minerals and exploration is concerned.”

Marston said the consensus view was that the northeastern part of Tasmania was part of the Lachlan Orogen, a heavily mineralised area of eastern Australia.

“The opportunity for us is really to unlock the unexplored potential of northeast Tasmania,” he said.

Gold was first discovered in Tasmania in 1852, which was also when the Victorian gold rush kicked off.

“I think a lot of the focus for gold was obviously in Victoria in the 1850s and Tasmania was a bit of a sideshow,” Marston said.

“It hasn’t had the amount of attention like they would have had in the Ballarat and Bendigo areas.”

Despite the lack of attention, Tasmania has had some very high-grade gold mines, the biggest one being Beaconsfield, which has produced just under 2 million ounces.

Golden Ridge

Flynn’s flagship project is Golden Ridge, which it has been working on since listing in 2021.

Around 11,000m of drilling has been completed at two main prospects, Brilliant and Trafalgar, which are 2.5km apart.

“In five of the diamond drill holes at Trafalgar, we’ve had intersections of over 100 grams per tonne gold over intervals of about half a metre, so there is a certainly a rich, rich core running through there,” Marston said.

“It’s multiple veins, sub-vertical and parallel, striking sort of north-east, south-west.”

The project is lightly drilled but two holes drilled underneath old workings intersected mineralised veins grading up to 40g/t gold.

“There’s a lot to like about the area,” Marston said.

“It’s always been known generally that sort of these gold veins – similar to Victoria – they may not necessarily be very wide, but the grades certainly make up for that, and it’s certainly very encouraging for us to see what we’ve seen.

“And with the gold price where it is, it’s really quite an exciting opportunity for us at Golden Ridge.”

The company has identified a 9km zone of old workings and gold-in-soil anomalies.

Earlier this week, Flynn announced it had discovered a new vein system at the Grenadier prospect.

The best result from trenching was 1.3m at 6.6g/t gold, including 0.4m at 17.7g/t.

Busy months ahead

Earlier this week, Flynn secured an at-the-market facility with Dolphin Corporate Partners for up to A$2 million of standby equity capital over the next three years.

The company also recently received a A$140,000 grant from the Tasmanian government.

Flynn plans to use the funds to drill the Golden Ridge Adit and the Link Zone, which will kick off in the coming weeks.

The Golden Ridge Adit has previously returned up to 64g/t gold.

“So a couple of holes underneath that, and then about 600 or 700m east of that, basically between the adit and Trafalgar, we’ve hit some mineralisation in some shallow RC holes we drilled in 2022, and it was 33m at half a gram in one of the RC holes there, so we’re twinning that hole and basically drilling a bit further down to hit the granite contact,” Marston said.

“The good thing we’ve seen, certainly at Trafalgar, where we drilled in the granites as well as the sediments, is we’re seeing gold on both sides of the contact, so the contact zone is the sweet spot at the moment to chase gold either side.

“But these veins aren’t running necessarily parallel to the contact. They’re oblique to it, so, we think this drilling at the Link Zone will be really quite interesting to get some diamond core in that, then we’re going to run a fence of RC holes, basically trying to pick it up the gold veins and the granites.”

Flynn is doing some internal modelling currently and is targeting the release of an initial exploration target before Christmas.

“We’re just working through that and, really, we think that’s an important milestone for the company to set the scene as to what we’ve achieved to date,” Marston said.

“People look at some of our results and go, ‘wow, they look good. How many answers have you got?’ And yeah, they do look good!

“So, without it disclosing anything to the people, I’ve just got to say ‘watch this space’.”