Abbotts North

The Abbotts North Project lies 35km north of Meekatharra in the Murchison region of Western Australia. Access from Meekatharra is via Great Northern Highway and the well-maintained Meekatharra-Mount Clere Road, which runs through part of the project area.

The Project falls within the Abbotts Greenstone belt in the northern portion of the Murchison Domain in the western Yilgarn Craton. Structurally, the Abbotts Greenstone Belt is part of the northeast-trending Meekatharra Structural Zone, positioned between the Carbar Fault and Chunderloo Shear Zone. The margins of the belt are structurally complex, and the belt is bounded by granites and monzogranites to the east, west and north.

Within the belt, the historical Abbotts mining centre produced approximately 1.28 tonnes of gold at an average grade of 31g/t. Two main deposits, the New Murchison King and the Vranizan are described as gold-quartz reefs within fine grained tuffaceous sediments with some meta-dolerites. The New Murchison King produced 760kg of gold at 35g/t between 1897 and 1908. The north-south striking, steeply dipping reef is an average of 0.5m thick and was mined to a depth of less than 80m. The Vranizan produced 380kg of Au at 28g/t between 1898 and 1904 and was mined to a depth of 100m. The Vranizan is a northwest striking, northeast dipping, north plunging reef approximately 1.2m wide. The mineralised Abbotts fault continues north and south under shallow cover into the project area and will be a focus for future exploration within the project area.