Just like our Olympians, the past five weeks has been a pivotal period for the highly promising WA brownfields explorer.

In late July, Javelin completed a placement and entitlement offer which raised more than A$2 million.

That followed the decision by the new board, led by Chieftan Securities founder Brett Mitchell as executive chairman, to focus on the Coogee gold project in Western Australia.

Mitchell had been a shareholder of Javelin for about three years and alongside other major shareholders, it was decided the company needed a recapitalisation and corporate refresh.

Geologist Pedro Kastellorizos, who is also the managing director of Argent Resources, joined the company as a non-executive director at the same time as Mitchell.

“Through the review that Pedro and I led of the company’s four projects, we made a very quick decision and assessment that the project that existed within the company, which we could relaunch the company off, was Coogee,” Mitchell said.

“In the ever-improving Aussie dollar gold price environment, it made a lot of sense to focus on that asset.”

In line with renewed focus, Javelin appointed Andrew Rich as a non-executive director. Rich is a mining engineer and current executive director of emerging WA gold producer Brightstar Resources.

Colleagues of Mitchell had recommended Rich as someone with extensive Goldfields expertise.

“I met with Andy to just to get a bit of advice from him on what he thought of Coogee and what he thought of the potential of that in the current gold price environment,” Mitchell said.

“And Andy, after a couple of meetings, really liked the project, was keen to get involved, rather than just giving some advice.”

Right commodity, prime location

The Coogee gold project is just 55km southeast of WA’s gold mining capital Kalgoorlie and sits on the north-eastern shore of Lake Lefroy, adjacent to Gold Fields’ world-class St Ives complex.

St Ives is the jewel in the crown of Gold Fields’ WA assets, producing 372,000 ounces at all-in costs of A$1958 an ounce.

Gold Fields spent A$38.7 million on exploration at St Ives last year, drilling around 850,000m.

St Ives has reserves of 2.6 million ounces at 3.37 grams per tonne.

Javelin, then known as Victory Mines, acquired the Coogee project in 2020.

ASX 200 gold miner Ramelius Resources previously owned the project and produced 20,400oz at a healthy grade of 4.7g/t gold via a 70m-deep pit in 2013.

When Javelin acquired the project, it had a modest resource of 10,600oz at 3.4g/t gold, which was updated to 49,000oz at 1.07g/t in 2022, following a 12-month drilling program.

This week, Javelin announced an increase in the resource to 3.65 million tonnes at 1.08 g/t gold for 126,685oz of contained gold, up 158%, as well as 1.01Mt at 0.41% copper for 4133t of contained copper.

“We went in and did a complete fresh review of all the historical drilling data, which came out with the upgraded resource the other day, and then, separately, all the geophysics and other available data in and around the mining lease and also the exploration license to look for exploration targets,” Mitchell said.

Gold mineralisation extends along strike for 1.2km at an average width of 350m and to more than 225m vertically, and remains open to the north and down-dip.

Javelin engaged Core Geophysics to reprocess ground and aeromagnetic survey data, which generated multiple drill targets.

“The thinking was, let’s have a clean and fresh review by independent experts on what we’ve got here, and then work out the way forward,” Mitchell said.

“A dual stream approach is the way we’re tackling it. We really want to focus our energies and resources in the immediate term on the exploration potential and exploration upside to actually interrogate a number of these targets which haven’t been drill tested at all or sufficiently in the past, where they haven’t drilled deep enough etc, so that’s our main focus.

“And then the second focus in parallel is we’re doing more work on the old Coogee pit. We’ll look at getting some new pit optimisations done that will really focus our thoughts on where we need to drill in and around the pit to try and define some more resources to then run the numbers on a potential restart of that mine.”

Javelin would look to reestablish production via toll treating with a number of mills in the region known to have excess capacity.

But first, Javelin is working towards kicking off a drilling program at Coogee to test eight high and medium-priority targets.

“We’re running hard to commence a drilling program in the December quarter,” Mitchell said.