Hi, it is Joe Mazundar of Exploration Insights. I'm at the PDAC 2026 edition of the Metals Investment Forum and with me right now is the CEO of Southern Cross Gold, Michael Hudson. Michael, how's it going? Southern Cross Gold is dual listed: SX2 on the ASX, SXGC on the TSX, which you just opened on Friday. Is that correct?
Correct. We had the honor of ringing the bell, so to speak. It's actually pressing a plastic button, I noticed. It's not linked to the market. Yeah, and they tape it. I think anyway.
So Southern Cross Gold always has a lot of rigs going, but now you have permitted a decline. So what's that all about?
That's all about building this project quicker, essentially, and the progressive permitting that comes with de-risking the project. It literally — the Victorian government wanted to advance this project. They came to us about a year ago and essentially said, in a nice way, 'Would you stop making it bigger and give us something to permit?' And it got us thinking about how to advance the project and that the government was really there to help support develop this project.
The government is here to help.
Exactly. And Victoria hasn't seen that for a long, long time. So it was a moment, and we said, well, the limitation on this project is the drill out. There's a limitation on any project, essentially: time and money. We've got the money, so it's time. So permit the decline, take a lot of the risk off the table because we're taking the water risk, the fauna and flora risk, the native veg risk, the air, the impact on people, and all those criteria. It's not building a mine; it's an exploration decline, but a lot of those things. So, for example, the water: we've learned what our water balance is and the quality of the water, and we can irrigate our large farm, which is 3,600 acres, and we've dealt with the water issue on the project by doing that.
That's from pumping the decline.
That's from dewatering.
So that's one example. So progressive permitting and working with a government that is genuinely supportive of the project, and then we can add another 12 rigs. So we've got 10 today going, and then double shifting them. So each rig underground is three times as productive, essentially, as a surface rig. And then you're drilling it out quicker. And we would go from 10-ish, 10 to 22 rigs on the project and two rigs regionally. So 24 project rigs.
And this would make it, as you said, one of the largest development projects, gold projects, or any project — pre-development projects globally.
Yeah. So, and then you're getting down, and there's other real aspects. You're getting down and seeing the mineralization and de-risking it from that point of view. You're taking bulk samples eventually and mapping it and saying, 'Well, this is what holes 20 or 30 meters apart look like. What does it look like when you go underground?' And of course we'll learn many things by doing that, and that's why you go underground on any high-grade deposit.
Oh yeah. Yeah. And they get more density of drilling, get things into indicated quicker. But this will be not so long from now in terms of you've got the portal. You're already doing it.
We're working — I mean, there's a lot of — and then if you look at the presentation, you'll see there's a lot of machines on surface getting all the surface work: the dams, the stockpiles, the portal construction. So setting ourselves up to go down with the tunnel or the decline. And that should start going underground — that will all be done by April, and then we should be done in six to seven months. So that's October to November to go down a kilometer.
And the budget's like 30 million. Was it 30 million Aussie? Okay. And in the meantime, you've got another budget for the drilling from surface that you'll be doing until —
60 million, and we're about 50 km into a 200 km drill program. Now we're converting from the exploration target, which was 2.2 to 3.2 million ounces at between 8.2 and 10.6 a year ago. You'll see an update to that. So that's obviously got bigger because we've drilled more.
And when would that update be?
It's coming in some months.
Yeah. I'm not going to give you a date.
No, not summer months. Some months' time.
Northern hemisphere summer or southern hemisphere some months?
It's an accent thing. So you've got the drilling obviously ongoing, and what was interesting from the last release — and I do read the releases — you were drilling towards Christina and you started hitting high-grade that way up on that section where usually, I mean, it's Rising Sun, Golden Dyke. You're taking those to depth because that's where a lot of the high grade is, but now you're finding additional high grade. It is an incredible project.
And, you know, somewhat naively, but it's all in hindsight, we did exactly as you said. We drilled under the old mines and we followed them down because we wanted to get deep early, because we know that these systems transition to amazingly high-grade systems below, and more gold over antimony at depth. Yeah, and lots more free gold, as opposed to gold associated with antimony, which, you know, is a simpler process. But it's the grade that's the main thing that changes. And so that's how we focused doing that over five different bodies across the 1.4 kilometers. And now just by nature of infill drilling — and it's not really infilling and not changing the volume — we're adding a lot to the volume by finding these new areas. And so Golden Dyke has just automatically doubled in width by one drill hole, showing us there's 16 more veins to the western side, and we know that Golden Dyke now joins to Rising Sun on the other side. So these things —
And one of them hasn't been drilled to the same depth.
Not at all. Golden Dyke's just starting to get into the Cinderella zone at that transition. We're just starting to see that in the holes that are around about five or six.
