The company is one of the more cashed up junior explorers on the ASX, with A$35.3 million in the bank at the end of September.

Indiana previously held the Ntaka Hill nickel project in Tanzania, but its license was cancelled by the Tanzanian government in early 2018, triggering an international arbitration process.

Indiana was victorious in that process and last year the Tanzanian government agreed to pay US$90 million to settle the claim, of which US$60 million has been returned to shareholders.

The cash it retained allows it to explore without the need to return to the volatile equity markets.

Indiana has also been undergoing a transformation of its personnel.

The company’s executive chair is Bronwyn Barnes, who is also the CEO of Robert Friedland’s iron ore developer Ivanhoe Atlantic.

In August, Matthew Bowles was appointed as managing director and CEO. Bowles was most recently at Western Australian gold explorer Alto Metals, which was acquired by growing gold producer Brightstar Resources.

The company has also promoted commercial manager John Fitzgerald to chief operations officer.

Bowles said the company would be making further appointments to beef up its technical team

Fertile ground

Indiana holds more than 5000 square kilometres of ground in SA’s Central Gawler Craton. Its ground surrounds, and is adjacent to, Barton Gold’s advanced projects.

Barton is advancing a regional hub and spoke model with an aim to produce 150,000 ounces of gold per annum.

Barton’s market capitalisation is about 10 times Indiana’s but the company has built a resource inventory of just over 2.2 million ounces, highlighting the opportunity for Indiana.

Indiana’s recent focus has been the Minos prospect, which covers the Lake Labyrinth shear zone, the majority of which remains untested.

Minos has returned consistent high-grade gold results over a 650m strike with mineralisation remaining open.

Best results have included 38m at 6.54 grams per tonne gold from 29m; 21m at 8.43g/t gold from 176m; 20m at 7.31g/t gold from 186m, including 1m at 118g/t gold; 26m at 4.28g/t gold from 68m; 12m at 9.06g/t gold from 106m, including 1m at 95.6g/t gold; 10m at 4.95g/t gold from 112m, including 1m at 27.8g/t gold; and 2m at 25.85g/t gold from 351m.

The final reverse circulation result from the previous program returned 4m at 13g/t gold from 130m, reported last month.

Last month, the company kicked off a 7000m aircore program to follow up previous soil sampling at the Ariadne and Company Well prospects, which defined gold mineralisation over a 2km strike.

“We’re drilling a couple of other targets near our main prospect,” Bowles said. “We got up to three grams as our maximum soils, and we got a few one gram soil responses, so we’re following up those.

“The ground sits in a structural area and there’s a lot of old workings through there as well.”

Previous drilling at Ariadne has returned 11m at 2.44g/t gold from 40m; 10m at 2.24g/t gold from 9m; and 9m at 2.61g/t gold from 131m.

The aircore drilling will help to define targets for the next round of RC drilling.

In the background, there is also ongoing work focused on target generation.

Drill, drill, drill

Indiana is currently trading at below cash backing.

A research report by Terra Studio earlier this year pointed out that the grades Indiana was hitting were comparable to its peers, which include Barton and Marmota.

While the company is yet to report a resource, the report said the enterprise value to resource multiple of Indiana’s peers boded well for the re-rate potential of the company.

In the meantime, Bowles is adopting former Spartan Resources boss and now Ramelius Resources deputy chair Simon Lawson’s motto of “drill, drill, drill”.

News flow in the next few months will include the results from the current aircore program, which should feed into a new round of RC drilling.

“We’ve got a targeting exercise going on at the moment, so highlighting some of the other regional targets in the area,” Bowles said.

“I’m looking at building out the team appointments, and then that will lead up to us hitting it harder next year with the drilling and that obviously will then lead into further resource work.”