Good morning everybody. Thank you to Metal Investor Forum for hosting Southern Cross Gold Consolidated, thank you for — Joe, thank you for your work in the industry. Joe, you're very unique. And thank you to all of you for your time to come and listen to this story. It's a very exciting new discovery. It's only been around for the last few years and I'm very much looking forward to the next ten minutes, just running through the disclaimer. Should you be thinking of investing, please make sure you go back and read that.
I'm the managing director, Michael Hudson. I helped co-found this company a few years ago and over the last two and a bit years we've put 70 kilometres into a discovery that is called Sunday Creek down here in the southern part of Australia. It's been rated independently by Richard Schodde from MinEx Consulting at the end of 2023 as one of the key twelve discoveries across all commodities in Australia since 2023. We've doubled the project, so it's certainly become more important than less important, and you can see some of the other key discoveries there in Australia.
Just looking at the metrics, Joe — we are dual listed, so despite the accent, despite the Australian-only listing here, you can buy this stock in Canada. So it is dual listed, you get the benefit of both listings there. We are cashed up, we've got a market cap around 750 million Canadian. A key aspect of this company, before I get into the metrics, is the shareholder base, who are really focused on per-share value — very, very, very important. We never want to create companies with higher market caps and keep the share price steady, so that takes a lot to execute, and there's a shareholder base who I'm learning a lot from on how that happens.
So we've got Pierre Londe is one of our major shareholders there with Firelight Investments, a guy called Darren Morhem who some of you may know, and a group who hunt together. So that's 30-odd percent of the register. 20-odd, 25% is the normal institutions perhaps that you'd see, but some of the best institutions globally who've come in to get behind this discovery.
Just from a high level, from a hit rate point of view, we've got more than six — well, we've got 600 gram-metre hits into this deposit divided by the 70 kilometres of drilling. That hit rate is better than anything else that I can see globally in a discovery for the last few years. So it's a very good start, a very good exploration metric — doesn't make for a mine, but certainly makes for a very, very good discovery. And what you want to see in any deposit is the hit rate getting better as management understands the deposit and more data informs us, and that's exactly what's happening here.
So 70 kilometres in, but we've got 60 kilometres to drill within the next year. So we're really focused on increasing the drilling — in that we've got six rigs at site, and we've announced we're going to bring another two to bring it up to eight by early April. Another key aspect is we own more than a thousand hectares of freehold in Australia. The state owns the mineral rights, but the farmland above the discovery is owned by the landholder, and now we're the landholder, and we've got not only the discovery area but the area adjacent from that discovery to develop a project.
There's a lot of data here. Just want to — I'm not going to read out drill intersections for you, but here's the top ten. Many of these intersections, most have come in the last six or twelve months, so that's that hit rate getting better. You can see gold and then the antimony also. It used to be the most important metal you'd never heard of; now everyone seems to know about antimony. This is an 80/20 mix for us, so the gold will pay for it, the antimony will help permit it. This will be one of the largest antimony projects in the West and will create a key part of reforming the supply chain that we've lost.
This is gold and gold grade and width, just to show you the data set at 2 gpt and 1 gpt. Some extremely high grades that you can see, but you can see the median widths are around three to four metres of every individual structure — we've got over 70 of them at the moment — so that just shows to that point.
And this slide's a new one, it's never been shown before, and it's just showing the growth of this project. So when we got to this project in 2020, 2021, we spun it out of a company out of here in Canada actually, and it had a few hits — you can see the grades down here showing the very highest grades. And in 2022 we really made that key discovery down there where we said, 'Oh my goodness, this is getting better and bigger and what have we got?' And then in 2023 we grew it, and you can see we've doubled it in the last year. So it's growing with all those drill rigs and it's getting better. This scale here you can see is 500 metres, so we've drilled it about 1.2 kilometres down to about a kilometre.
Here's the project location. We're 60 kilometres north of Melbourne, that reinvents how you can actually design a project. Also, waste rock won't be waste rock — we've got a quarry within 10 kilometres of us who are willing and wanting to take that rock from us that won't go back underground as paste, fill, etc.
This is Fosterville that Joe referred to, 100 kilometres, an Agnico-operated mine. It was the highest-grade gold deposit on Earth for four of the last eight years, it's still the second-highest-grade gold mine. It was the lowest AISC, it was a top ten producer, and what we have is the next cab off the rank, if you like. Geologically these systems are very similar, as is one other here called Costerfield, which is Australia's only antimony producer — a gold project with an antimony byproduct owned by Mandalay Resources.
Zooming in, this project can grow a lot bigger. We're only about 5% of the way into the discovery. So that's — oops, sorry, lucky it's before lunch — that discovery there is a key area that I was just talking to.
So we put about 70 kilometres into that area. The key point is that this can get a lot bigger. So there's a string of old mines with a little bit of drilling that we've done along the trend, which is 12 kilometres, which is a very similar footprint to Fosterville, about 12 kilometres.
So we've got one rig now going to be dedicated into that exploration area, because the torque of exploration in these discoveries is vast and you don't want to rely on new discoveries — and when you need them you've got to plan a year or so before. So we're doing lots of geophysics, etc., in that area.
Let's just zoom down, with only a very short time frame. This is the band of rocks that host the gold, and then within that band of rocks there's all these veins, so it very much looks like a ladder looking down flat. Here's 200 metres of that core one-kilometre area, and that's the structure that continues for 11 kilometres that way and 1 kilometre back that way. The same geology continues across that whole trend, and there are actually parallel zones that we're starting to find too. So lots of upside, as I've pointed out.
Going back and looking at the underground here, you can see the scale, some of the old mines. This was an old mining district for 50 years. In fact, it was kept open by the British during World War I for its antimony under the Imperial Munitions Act. But it's heartbreaking to see what the old-timers actually left behind, if only they had the technology that we have today.
Now, in the blue area here that I'll just outline, we're coming out with an exploration target upgrade. So you can see that's all drill constrained. The yellow holes there are those that we're putting in — well, that we've got in the lab. The black are those that we've reported. You can see the very highest grades — there are 300 of them. Greater than 10 gpt is in red, greater than 1 gpt is in green, and everything in between. A year ago we put out an exploration target something around that area like that. Now we've more than doubled that. And a year ago that was 1 to 1.6 million ounces at 7 to 10 gpt gold equivalent with 20% coming from the antimony. So look for that news flow.
We've announced that it's coming early, early March, and you'll hopefully be as impressed as we are of the success that we've had over the last year of drilling. It won't stop, of course, it's going to get a lot bigger. There's a lot of the area that's not included with some very good results out here to the west, still early stage. And if this continues down to its natural area, down to the bottom of this area, it's going to get a lot bigger than what you'll see on Monday. Of course this won't stop at one kilometre — surrounding mines go to more than, well, to around two kilometres, so it can double that way. And then this slide's only 10% of the larger trend, so it is going to get a lot bigger, even though it's already going to be one of the key, very rare, high-grade multi-million-ounce discoveries made in the world over the last few years. These discoveries are extremely rare, so it is early days.
We're expanding that core area, we're testing along strike as we've talked about. Lots of work behind the scenes going on — metallurgy, mining, all the baseline work that you'd expect professionals in our industry to do, as Liberty outlined.
Lots of rigs — the six rigs now at site, two more coming, and we'll be looking at permitting access underground shortly.
So, one of the discoveries with the highest hit rate globally. We've de-risked it from many points of view — from the metallurgical point of view, large exploration upside, the antimony being a key part of it. Gold will pay for it, antimony will help permit it.
A very good team where we've got Kenny Bush, Lisa Gibbons and Nick Meagher here — we're just out the door, so please come and visit us — and that unique shareholder base to create value, help us create value per share and create this very high-margin gold project that's one of the better discoveries globally. So thank you very much for your time. Thanks.
