Junior gold producer New Murchison Gold backed the IPO, investing A$1 million following an initial A$1 million investment last year to give it a 17.6% stake.

Parbo was formed around five years ago by Mining Plus managing director Ben Auld and chartered accountant and Barton Gold Holdings founder Neil Rose.

Parbo has amassed 1226 square kilometres of ground in Western Australia’s Murchison and Bryah Basin regions, which it has been working on for several years, backed by private funding.

Auld is chair of the company, with Rose and well-known geologist Peter Langworthy as non-executive directors. Kalgoorlie-based geologist Tim Campbell is CEO.

Unlike many new floats, Parbo is already drilling, meaning investors won’t have to wait as long for the first news flow.

The company will list on Tuesday with a market cap of about A$12.8 million and an enterprise value of around A$6 million.

Looking for Monty

Parbo kicked off drilling at the Brians Mill prospect, part of the Bryah Basin project, earlier this month.

The project was acquired from Strickland Metals last year.

“We’re hunting for those copper-gold style deposits in there, like the DeGrussa and Monty,” Campbell said.

“We do also have gold prospects in there, so we’ll be going for both, but I guess the largest upside is those copper-gold style discoveries.”

The project hosts several prospects and targets.

“Everyone says it’s been done to death by Sandfire after they found [DeGrussa], but a lot of it was broad-scale RAB and not a lot of it was followed up,” Campbell said.

A strategic review of the targets identified the Brians Mill gold prospect, where previous shallow drilling intersected gold, and the Narracoota volcanogenic massive sulphide prospect as the top priorities.

The current drilling at Brians Mill is focusing on a 2km-long anomaly.

“Being that there are confirmed mineralised intercepts in this area, for us, it’s a great starting point to get some runs on the board and start to define some grades that gives us the highest probability,” Campbell said.

“It’s been called our safe project. It might not be the next Plutonic or it might not be the next DeGrussa, but it could prove to be a nice little resource.”

At Narracoota, the company is seeking another DeGrussa or Monty.

Previous explorers did not have the benefit of geophysics with historical holes thought to have hit the western edge of a large electromagnetic anomaly.

Langworthy was with Talisman Mining when Monty was discovered.

“As soon as he saw this deep moving-loop EM and the gravity confluence, he straight away said that is an exact Monty lookalike,” Auld said.

The WA government has awarded Parbo a A$230,000 grant under the Exploration Incentive Scheme to drill Narracoota.

Plutonic 2.0

Once drilling is completed at Bryah Basin, the rig will move across to the Mount Padbury gold project, which has never seen a drill hole.

To the east is over five million metres of drilling, which has resulted in 44 open pit and four underground mines.

“What we’re targeting there is a new major greenstone belt. We believe there’s a potential for a concealed greenstone belt there,” Campbell said.

“We’re hunting for analogies to the Plutonic-style mineralisation because that’s a granite overthrust greenstone.

“There’s no outcropping greenstones, so it’s just been ignored. There have been prospectors there finding gold for 20-plus years across this tenure, so it has to come from somewhere.”

The Oddjob and Gold Finger targets will be the first to be drill-tested with density readings registering higher than granites.

“There is definitely something different beneath the surface. We’re shedding gold on the surface. There is gold there. The prospectors are finding it,” Campbell said.

“All that remains is for us to put the drill bit in and prove what’s there, basically, and what it is.”

The company has also been awarded a A$230,000 EIS grant for diamond drilling.

Auld said Parbo was equally excited about the potential across its two projects.

“What if we actually do unlock a 60km concealed greenstone belt that’s been overlooked for 40 years and has exact analogies to Plutonic? That becomes really quite exciting,” he said.

“That’s what that’s what discovery is all about.

“Greenfields exploration is such a hard thing for people to back because the timeline is so long, but again, Peter Langworthy gave us that support.

“He pretty much said quite plainly that there is not an opportunity where a junior is chasing such a large land package to open up an entire greenstone belt and so that gave us confidence to sort of say, ‘well, let’s shoot for actual proper defined district-scale’.”