Auravelle builds gold exploration momentum across SA and WA

Auravelle has three projects in South Australia’s central Gawler Craton: Nuckulla Hill, Tunkillia North and Skye.

The projects are in the same neighbourhood as the 1.2 million ounce Challenger mine and 1.6Moz Tunkillia project, which is being developed by Barton Gold Holdings.

“The best indicator for gold is gold, and we’ve got a plus-one million ounce deposit just up the road at Tunkillia,” Auravelle managing director Andrew Muir told the Resources Rising Stars Gather Round conference in Adelaide this month.

Auravelle holds 40km of the Yarlbrinda shear zone, which hosts the Tunkillia deposit.

“It’s had very little testing,” Muir said.

“It’s got the same rocks, the same shear – we just need to get in there and start testing it.”

There had been no drilling at Nuckulla Hill since the 1990s until Auravelle completed its first program in mid-2025.

The results from the Sheoak target were better than Auravelle expected.

Results included 21m at 3.1 grams per tonne gold, including 3m at 10.5g/t gold; 6m at 8g/t gold, including 1m at 25.4g/t gold and 1m at 15.8g/t gold; and 5m at 5.8g/t gold, including 1m at 20.2g/t gold.

Muir described the results as outstanding.

“We’ve got a 200m strike of mineralisation still open to the north and south – that’s within a 600m-long anomalous zone,” he said.

“The grades and widths were much better than what we were expecting, relative to the historical drilling that’s been done, so we think Sheoak’s an absolutely outstanding opportunity.”

Muir said one of the challenges of having a large strike length of underexplored ground was deciding where to drill next.

“We undertook a large geochemical soils program last year that identified a large number of anomalies on both Nuckulla Hill and Tunkillia North, so that really highlighted the prospectivity of the region,” he said.

Last week, the company announced it had completed a high-resolution aerial magnetic survey at Nuckulla Hill, which delivered a high-quality dataset to be used in geological interpretation and gold targeting activities.

The interpretation and review of the data is underway and will build on the soil sampling results and a recent structural geological review.

The data will be used to plan the next drilling program, which will include infill and extensional drilling at Sheoak, as well as a regional gold discovery aircore program.

“We think this area is absolutely ripe for the picking,” Muir said.

“We’ve got good structural targets. The geochemistry highlights that there’s gold in the system, so we just need to get in there and start putting holes into this thing.”

Auravelle will also conduct initial soil sampling at Skye to the north.

Skye is almost completely surrounded by Marmota’s ground, where it has recently been reporting grades of up to 109g/t gold and where drilling restarted last week.

In Western Australia, Auravelle holds the Crown gold project, 40km southeast of Kalgoorlie.

“We really like Crown due to its strategic location,” Muir said.

“Obviously, everyone knows Kalgoorlie is a very big gold jurisdiction – a lot of big gold deposits there – but not only that, there’s a lot of third-party processing plants.”

Crown adjoins Black Cat Syndicate’s ground and Vault Minerals, Northern Star Resources and Horizon Minerals, all of which own plants, are in the vicinity.

“For something like Crown, we don’t need to find anything particularly big to be able to monetise whatever we find there,” Muir said.

Earlier this month, Auravelle picked up some tenements from Orange Minerals for $200,000 in shares to double the size of the Crown project.

The project contains similar geology and structures to Black Cat’s 500,000oz-plus Majestic gold mining centre next door.

“One thing to note is that this project has had no historical RC drilling on it, so it’s all been aircore or RAB and it’s all shallow,” Muir said.

Auravelle’s initial aircore program, completed late last year, returned low-grade results but confirmed that gold anomalism is present over at least 2km north-south.

“We’ll be getting up there later on this year to do some more soil sampling to generate some aircore and follow-up RC drill targets,” Muir said.

Auravelle recently had a board revamp with former Core Lithium managing director Stephen Biggins becoming chairman.

Biggins is also Auravelle’s largest shareholder, while its other substantial shareholder is Lowell Resources Fund. Lowell’s John Forwood also sits on the Auravelle board.

The board changes position Auravelle for what is set to be a busy remainder of 2026.

“We’ve got multiple drill programs, we’ve got soil sampling results in WA and South Australia,” Muir said.

“A lot of potential for exploration success, so an outstanding risk-return profile for us. We’ve got a low EV and we’re highly, highly leveraged for exploration success.”