Hi, it's Joe Mazumdar from Toronto at the PDAC edition of the Metals Investment Forum. With me right now is the President and CEO of Southern Cross Gold Consolidated, which is now a dual-listed company exploring for gold in Victoria, in Australia. Mike Hudson. Joe.
Mike, so we've talked about this project before in the September edition of the Metals Investment Forum back in Vancouver last year. So incrementally, what has happened in the interim? I know you had a big drill program that you're already doing right now with six, potentially up to eight rigs. So what's happening with Southern Cross Gold?
Well, a lot since September, Joe. So we've had five rigs, now we've got six, we're going to go to eight. We had two discoveries when we spoke last time, Apollo and Rising Sun. We've added another two, Golden Dyke under that old mine there, and Christina, and seeing the same very good grades over hundreds of meters of mineralization with multiple high-grade veins within those zones. We're doing more met test work, we're starting a lot of the permitting for the project. We've got a network of BS in there looking to access underground via a decline, so collecting all the data for that. And the biggest news is that we've consolidated the capital structure in many ways and now created a very investable product that's simple. It's one company owns 100% of the asset. It's dual-listed on the TSX-V, trades as SXGC, and back in Australia is SX2.
And before it was just Australia, and I remember there was the company that you consolidated with Marson had owned 50% of it because Southern Cross was a spin-out of Marson. And I think cleverly you worked out and tried to consolidate the share structure in terms of the owners prior, such that the actual merger was so much easier. It was bringing together two halves of essentially the same thing, and now it's simpler, it's consolidated, and yeah, that's right. And then I think importantly, as we talked about previously when I was in Victoria for the site visit, is that most of the people that made money on Fosterville weren't from Australia, but they were from Canada. And so usually the people that have made money come back, whereas people from Victoria would still look at it like, oh, that's nice, but I never made money off of Fosterville because it was a Canadian-listed company and Nico bought it.
Yeah, the Canadians dominate the renaissance of the Victorian goldfields, and everyone knows the Fosterville story. But in five seconds, it's been the highest-grade gold mine for four out of the last eight years on Earth. It was the lowest all-in sustaining costs, it was a top-10 producer, it created $1 billion of market cap appreciation, and that was all in this market here. So what we've done in Australia over the last few years was really re-educate the Australian market about what a wonderful opportunity that the Victorian goldfields can provide. And Sunday Creek is Fosterville in many respects, geologically, Mark.
So in terms of the drilling, we're talking about regionally multiple kilometers, but the focus has been on most of the drilling on the 1.35 km Sunday Creek. But you know, the median thickness, people get confused, I guess, thinking it's less than a meter when it's more like three to four meters. But you're drilling down now to a kilometer, sorry, and you've got an exploration target there of about 1.6 kilometers, but now 1.6 million ounces. Now you're going to come up with a new one, according to your presentation, correct?
We've stated that in March we'll be putting a new exploration target together that will be drill-constrained, and we'll treat it like a resource. We're running internal resources with SRK, who do the resource work at Fosterville and Costerfield, so we're bringing that knowledge in and all the specialization on how you deal with these high-grade, moderate-nugget, not high-nugget deposits. And so we're going to put that around literally two-thirds of our discoveries. The western side at Christina is just a little bit earlier in terms of drilling, so that's all upside, if you like. And basically we've doubled the scale of the project in terms of drill footprint over the last year. So stay tuned.
And so that would be the exploration targets. I think we were talking about this, it's a common thematic in Australia, but it's not very common in Canada to have exploration targets, you know.
Yeah, there's exploration targets and exploration targets, like there are resources and resources. So you can actually produce exploration targets under 43-101, but it must be more constrained than the Australian version, the JORC version, where you can put targets around geophysical anomalies, for example. Now we're very much in the Canadian scheme anyhow. We've got a density of drilling that's not over the entire area ready to put into a resource. We're running subsets of that as a resource, so we're taking that learning from that subset and expanding it into where the drill holes are, say, 100 by 100 meters, and we need 25 by 50 to put it in resource.
Right, and that would be an inferred resource, correct? Right, okay. And so also, I mean, we're constantly talking about this 1.35-kilometer strike length of Sunday Creek, but you've got a bigger land package out there. So how do we quantify that going forward?
