Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: Gold Stocks

Au Gold Corp. (TSX-V: AUGC)(OTC: AUGCF) CEO Marc Blythe on Unlocking a Forgotten High-Grade Gold-Antimony District in Victoria, Australia

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the founder and CEO of Au Gold Corp. (TSX-V: AUGC)(OTC: AUGCF) — Mr. Marc Blythe. 

Marc, it is a pleasure having you on. We were chatting a bit backstage, and I told you it’s been a while. But it feels good to have you back out doing what you love to do most, at least professionally, which is to go find gold. In this case, there’s a kicker. How have you been, sir?

Marc Blythe: I’m great, Gerardo. It’s fantastic to be working on a project that seems like it’s been overlooked over the years, and Victoria has really come into its own as a jurisdiction the last probably five years or so. People are finding some things there that are really exciting, as you’re probably aware of.

Gerardo Del Real: Yes, and don’t tell them all the things yet. Let me set it up a little bit.

Marc Blythe: Yeah, sure.

Gerardo Del Real: A few months back, a mutual friend of ours came to me and said, “Hey, you remember Marc, right?” I said, “Of course. I’ve got all the time in the world for Marc.” So he’s got this project that’s pretty interesting. I said, “Okay, I’ll look at it.” So I’m looking and I go, “Okay, Australia — that checks jurisdiction.”

Then I go, “Oh, gold.” So I like that one. Check that one. “Oh, antimony.” I’m like, “Timing couldn’t be better for antimony and gold in Australia.” Checks that box. Then I look at the market cap, and it’s like sub-C$10 million with one of the cleanest share structures that you’ll see out there.

So you and I have history. We’ve done well in the past together with other deals, but I’ve got to tell you, as a biased shareholder, I could not be more excited.

So with that being said, can you give the fine folks out there an idea of why this past-producing, district-scale gold-antimony project was so overlooked? And then let’s get into the guts of the project because you have an analog that you’re going to hate me for using, but you were there recently.

That’s Sunday Creek, Southern Cross Gold’s $2.5 billion monster that just — it’s like Christmas every week with the drill results over there. Obviously, you are at a much earlier stage, and you have a lot of work to do to prove that up. But tell me about the project, the background, and why you’re so excited about it. 

Marc Blythe: Yes, so just completely through circumstance, I happened to make a visit to the Costerfield Mine, which is owned by Alkane, in late 2024. Then, Mike Hudson, who you mentioned there, invited me very kindly to come and visit Sunday Creek, Southern Cross’s project there that’s had massive success, huge market cap. So I managed to visit both of those projects.

Then, I was kind of reflecting over Christmas that year, December 2024, about, “I wonder what else has been missed in Victoria.” I started getting online and Googling and stuff and came across some gold-antimony showings that hadn’t really been followed up.

There was this one that kind of stuck in my memory. It was an old historic mine from the 1880s where they had so much antimony in the gold that they couldn’t separate the gold from the antimony with the battery stamp process, so they abandoned the mine. 

I thought, “Wow, I wonder if anyone’s been back there to poke some drill holes at that.” I dug around a little bit and found that nobody had. I thought that’s just a huge opportunity.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah, and you’re being modest. I mean, look, Victoria’s got more than I think like 80 or 85 million ounces of historic gold production. The antimony in Australia, especially recently, has become — pun intended — a very, very critical part of the strategy moving forward to secure critical metals that are independent of a Chinese supply chain. 

So again, I think the timing for a potentially high-grade gold-antimony project couldn’t be better. Give me an idea of the type of deposit it is because I use the analog of Sunday Creek. But that’s not just because it’s in Australia and not just because there’s gold and antimony. There are some similarities geologically which inform that there is at least a potential for something similar there.

Marc Blythe: That’s right, Gerardo. Most of the gold found in Victoria, the 80 million ounces historically, is traced back to what’s known as orogenic gold systems, which I don’t want to lose your listeners, but that’s a term that tells you how the gold was put there in the first place. 

There’s a very small subset of those deposits that are actually epizonal, and the ones that have been found more recently in that bucket include Fosterville, which is Agnico Eagle.

That deposit is now being pointed at as potentially a ~12 million ounce deposit by the time it’s all said and done. It’s a massive deposit, super high grades. It’s one of the highest-grade gold mines in the world. Costerfield, which is Alkane’s mine, is a little bit smaller. It does about 50,000 ounces a year plus that antimony. I think it’s one of the largest Western world producers of antimony.

Then, more recently, Southern Cross Gold’s project at Sunday Creek — it’s also epizonal. So these epizonal gold deposits, I feel like, are going to be what people are looking for when they go to Victoria. 

I think Victoria had a bit of a reputation perhaps of being a little tougher to do permitting and mining. But that’s really changed because the state has spent a lot of money on infrastructure, and they’ve realized they need to increase their tax revenues. And now they’re much more open for business. There are some great permitting stories coming out of Victoria now.

Gerardo Del Real: Let’s talk about the historic production. The average grade was, I think, something like 22.5 grams per tonne, with production between one and 10 ounces of gold per ton, with limited mining. I think it went down like some 100 meters or 120 meters — some 400 feet. The potential here is substantial as far as having multiple targets and having district-scale potential. Can you speak to that?

Marc Blythe: Yes, it’s a fantastic story. I got really immersed in the history when I was reading about all of these old mine shafts and stuff, and they’re very small scale. 

They’re often small groups of people working them. We’re talking about the 1880s. They were really limited by the technology of the day. So when we talk about pumping, we’re talking about buckets on a rope and a shaft. It’s nothing electric or anything like that.

Even steam power only came in towards the 1900s there, and only at the bigger operations. So these smaller mines were limited in how deep they could go. So they basically stopped, and there was more below them, and they basically were hand-sorting ore and stuff, and the veins were quite narrow, but they were getting fantastic grades out of this material.

Gerardo Del Real: How do you prioritize a project with this scale? And again, I want to emphasize the scale because you have multiple trends and shafts and targets. And look, you got some work to do. You just raised some capital. We wrote a check. But you have some work to do in prioritizing the targets for drilling here in the next several months, right?

Marc Blythe: Yes, definitely. I mean, it’s crazy the amount of historic workings, which are a really good clue as to where the old-timers found gold on the project. The old timers are actually really good at it. There are places that have had a little scratching and places that have had much more substantial workings. There’s a lot of ground that’s been turned over. Some of that is alluvial and some of it’s hard rock.

So we’re actually doing forensic geology at the moment, trying to reconstruct some of those old workings and stuff and looking at things like newspaper articles to figure out what information we can glean from the historic record about what the grades were at certain parts of certain mines and try and build a bit of a 3D picture of where we ought to focus. 

But I’m super excited by the gold-antimony story. That antimony has only been recorded at that one mine. So that’s kind of ground zero for us of where we want to begin.

Then, on that overlay, we have to consider that a lot of the ground there is private property. So we’ve been having some pretty productive discussions with people that own that private property, and it’s small farms, and we’re working on getting access to those for drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. I know exploration has started on the flagship. What comes next?

Marc Blythe: We’re doing a whole bunch of things all at once. We’re doing drill planning, we’ve got some sampling that’s been done, we’ve got some sampling we’re probably going to do to supplement some of the data we have. We have some things that are peripheral to the main trends that we’re interested in as well.

We talked about one of those in a recent press release, the Oxonian zone, where a previous operator found rock samples up to 26 grams per tonne and nobody did any follow-up. So we just look at that and go, “Oh wow, if there are rocks that are 26 grams a tonne, we should go there and try and understand — is there more of it, and how does that occur, and what could we do about it? Is it substantial?”

There are lots of threads going on. We’ve got regulatory and community stuff as well. We’re quite close to a town. We actually stay in hotels in the town, and it’s a 10-minute drive to the project. 

We’re trying to make sure we make a good impression on the town. The town’s a little bit economically depressed with a lot of vacant stores on the main street. So we’re trying to integrate ourselves there. I think people are generally pretty welcoming that we’re going to be spending money in the town and maybe giving things a bit of a boost.

Gerardo Del Real: It sounds like if you do things the right way, there’s going to be some opportunity to hopefully delineate a potentially economic gold-antimony deposit and contribute to the local economy as well.

Marc Blythe: For sure. That’s one of the key angles for us.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting stuff. Where’s the market cap today, ballparking?

Marc Blythe: We’re still under C$15 million. I’ve talked to so many people, but there are still so many people that haven’t heard this story. I’m the biggest shareholder, the biggest cheerleader of the company. So I’m really excited to have you on board and looking forward to updating you as things move forward, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: We absolutely love introducing stories to our audience at an early stage. Again, you check the gold, the critical metals, the jurisdiction, the share structure, and the market cap boxes. It doesn’t get much better than that, especially given the volatility that we have in the overall indices right now.

I’ve got to remind everybody that we’re sitting at $4,300 to $4,400 gold. If you would’ve told us this two years ago, we would’ve been shouting from the rooftops with glee and joy, and yet everybody’s looking at it like, “Man, but it’s not $5,000.” So what an environment to be working in.

I couldn’t be more excited for the next several months and really excited for the June/July, second-half-of-the-year time period where you get those drills turning and get to work to see what’s really down there.

Marc Blythe: Definitely, and we’re looking forward to having you on that journey, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Beautiful. Marc, thanks for your time as always, sir.

Marc Blythe: Thanks, Gerardo. 

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