Gateway has been around for many years but has a fresh look after acquiring the Yandal gold project from Strickland Metals in August last year.

The company has a new board and management, most of whom are current and former Strickland executives.

Executive chairman Andrew Bray has sunk A$10 million of his own money into Gateway in the past six months.

“You can’t get much more alignment of interest than me putting my money where my mouth is and building up a 10% stake,” he told this month’s Resources Rising Stars Summer Series.

Gateway also managed to raise A$22.5 million to fund an aggressive exploration program.

The company had cash of just under A$20 million at the end of December, as well as shares in Brightstar Resources worth A$9.3 million.

“Our approach with companies like this is you always need to have a proper balance sheet,” Bray said.

“We’re a little bit different to other companies who do smaller raises, smaller programs. We always like to bite the bullet early, fix the balance sheet, and then attack the projects hard.”

The company has completed its first drilling program at Yandal and reported multiple nugget hauls from the Great Western area, which has become its top priority.

“We’ve actually stopped reporting all of the nugget finds,” Bray said.

“It seemed every time a prospector went out there, they made a nugget haul discovery and we don’t want to be in the business of mining nuggets, but it is a very extensive lateral surface area of gold mineralisation.”

The company’s first drilling program at the Mustang area culminated in the Haflinger discovery on the Celia shear structure.

Haflinger returned 52m at 1.4 grams per tonne gold from 64m, including 12m at 3.1g/t gold.

Last week, the company reported that aircore drilling immediately to the west of Haflinger identified a new prospect called Hummer, returning 16m at 1g/t gold from 64m, including 4m at 2.7g/t gold.

“What that does is it validates our exploration methodology that we’re applying to the project,” Bray said.

Drilling to resume

Gateway will kick off a major drilling program on March 9, using two aircore rigs and one reverse circulation rig.

“It will be a genuine full-frontal assault with the drill rig attacking this,” Bray said. “If there’s something there, this program will hit it.”  

Despite being 50km from Northern Star Resources’ Yandal hub, Gateway’s ground remains under-explored, with only 26% of historical drilling going to depths of greater than 100m.

“The most remarkable thing about this is, despite the fantastic gold endowment throughout the southern parts, the top part of the belt, which is what we control the entirety of, is largely under-explored and completely unexplored in some of the most prospective areas,” Bray said.

“You hear a lot of people say all the easy stuff’s been found in Western Australia and that we’re not going to see any more big pits being discovered, but what we can show with our project is that categorically is not true.

“There are areas, particularly at Great Western, where it’s as close as you can get to a gold deposit sticking out of the ground that has never ever been drilled up until we arrived.

“Geologically, this is as good as you get for an area to host a large deposit.”

Great Western, which has multiple shear zones and intrusions, is the top priority area for drilling.

“This is the sort of project that should have been drilled 10, 20, 30 years ago but for whatever reason, it was missed by previous explorers and prospectors,” Bray said.

The drilling program is expected to run for 4-5 weeks, with assays due several weeks after.

“We’re fairly confident that off the back of that program, we’re going to have something pretty exciting to be making a song and dance about,” Bray said.

Beyond Great Western

Gateway believes the Mustang area is analogous to the Horse Well area to the west, which has a resource of 291,500 ounces at 1.94g/t gold.

“All of these systems appear to be interconnected,” Bray said. “Again, that’s another sign that tells us this is a very large gold system with very significant endowment.”

The company completed sampling and mapping at Mustang last year, paving the way for the ongoing aircore drilling program.

In light of the Hummer discovery, Gateway has expanded the drilling program.

Bray said the main difference between Mustang and Great Western was that Mustang was under cover.

“Although we’re all very confident of making multiple discoveries, when you compare that to something that’s potentially at surface at Great Western, it means that that a target like this becomes our second priority as we move forward through the year,” he said.

Gateway also holds the Glenburgh South project, adjacent to Benz Mining’s 510,000oz Glenburgh project, and is planning surface sampling programs following completion of an airborne magnetic survey.

Earlier this week, Benz announced an aggressive 275,000m drilling program at Glenburgh this year.