Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Mawson Gold (TSX: MAW)(OTC: MWSNF) CEO Ivan Fairhall on Mawson's Subsidiary SXG Drilling 305.8 m @ 2.4 AuEq (1.6 g/t Au, 0.5% Sb) at Sunday Creek, Victoria, Australia

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Mawson Gold, the very happy Ivan Fairhall. Ivan, congrats are in order. How are you, sir?

Ivan Fairhall: I'm very well, as you say, very happy man today. But yeah, I'm well. I hope you're well too.

Gerardo Del Real: I am. Well, thank you for asking. Let's get into the reason for the joy and the celebration. Your majority-owned Australian subsidiary Southern Cross Gold, which Mawson currently owns 60% of, just reported a hit of 305.8 meters of 2.4 grams per tonne gold equivalent. This at the Sunday Creek Project in Australia. That project is clearly emerging as one of the, if not the most exciting projects in this part of the world. And that's saying something given the address. I'll let you provide the context because there is a lot in this piece of news here.

Ivan Fairhall: Yeah, thanks for that. It is very exciting because this truly is just a really spectacular hole. In Victoria, you do not see mineralization over these kind of widths at this frequency. So 300 meters of 2.4 grams a tonne gold equivalent as you said, and 1.6 of gold. But within that, you had to report it at that level because there was so many high-grade intersections. They just kept going through vein sets. And so within that 306 meters, there was 12 intersections of over 20 grams a tonne gold, five of them over 100 grams a tonne. That's three ounces of gold, five over 100 grams of gold. So just so much mineralization. And the intention of the hole was to just drill under Rising Sun. And they never got to the end of ... They just kept drilling, kept running into mineralization. It went and went and went.

They had to change the drill rig halfway through because the first drill wasn't able to drill to the depths that they needed to get through the system. And so they doubled the number of vein sets on the project. They doubled the depth almost of the drilling on the project. And that's the really exciting thing here is there's an increasing amount of drilling that has gone into that Apollo zone and it's really starting to hang together. So you've got those high grade chutes forming. Then the path to scale and real opportunity is find more of those chutes, so moving along strike and then move deeper. And you really compound ... It's sort of an exponential type relationship where you can really grow the ounces per vertical meter by more of them and grow the meters in depth. And yeah, it's really shaping up very well.

It's doing all the things it needed to do as an asset to be truly one of the best discoveries in that region, in a region, which you alluded to, has a great postcode. It's got two of the top 10 highest grade goldmines on Earth that exist within 100 kilometers of it. And so just a great place to be making a discovery like this. And you've got analogs where those mines have come into production and have gotten better and better at depth. And that's the other important thing here is that some of the things that are being observed here in this mineralization... you're seeing the deposit transition in the same way the other mines have transitioned and become really world class assets at depth.

Gerardo Del Real: I mentioned the 305.8 meters of 2.4 grams per tonne gold equivalent. You mentioned the 12 high-grade intersections greater than 20 grams per tonne gold. You mentioned the five that are greater than a 100 grams per tonne gold. It should be noted that only 67% of the hole has been assayed so far down to 650 meters. I believe that drilling continued past 900 meters.

Ivan Fairhall: Yeah, it did. They drilled to 923 meters, and as you said, they've only processed 650 meters of that core. We need to see assays of the rest, but there was visible gold in veins that they discovered, in isolated areas that they discovered ... have seen in the core deeper. And so let's wait to see the assays, but this is not even the entire hole. It's really quite a phenomenal result.

Gerardo Del Real: Three rigs turning. I suspect you're likely, or Southern Cross is likely, to want to maybe increase the drilling there, given the success it's having.

Ivan Fairhall: Yeah. Well, Southern Cross announced that they, as part of their trading halt before they put in these announcements, that they were looking to do an equity capital raise, which we, as a shareholder, are very supportive of.

This is an asset that has real momentum. They're making discoveries. The rate of discovery is off the dial, these sort of new holes that keep coming and exceeding previous holes in width and whatever metric almost you want to measure it at. Absolutely the opportunity to put more drill rigs on the program, increase the rate of spend. Speed up that discovery process is great for shareholders, of which Mawson is the largest. And so we are a very happy shareholder with this discovery. Mawson benefits immensely because when you take an objective look at the facts, our stake even today ... And we haven't actually seen Southern Cross trade off the back of this news. Maybe by the time this comes out, it may have started trading again. But even today before this news came out, our stake was worth $45 million Canadian, which is more than our entire market cap.

We have over 50% of one of the hottest new discoveries on the planet that has cash momentum results blowing aggressively. And we have over 50% of that asset, 60% today. And we have our own fantastic asset in Finland. That's got a million ounces. We've got a PEA wrapped around it that pointed to almost 300 million Canadian in value. So nearly a dollar a share of value in that asset and huge exploration prospectivity. So that the value opportunity in Mawson and all the optionality that comes from our portfolio of assets is just really ... People should take a closer look at Mawson. And then we think that there's real re-rate potential when the market wakes from its slumber.

Gerardo Del Real: I couldn't agree more. Look, I know gold's consolidated a bit here this year. That's not going to last forever. We know how quick markets can turn once momentum is back in the space. And look, anything that resembles a high-grade story, like what's developing in Australia, and a project with such robust economics, like you have in Finland, which by the way also has exceptional upside potential. Any one of those stories is going to continue to get the kind of attention that the share price isn't getting right now. We know how quick that can change. I encourage everybody to dig deeper into Mawson Gold.

Ivan, it's great to have you back on. Anything else to add to that?

Ivan Fairhall: No, I think we've covered it for the day and give people a chance to get on their computers and take a look.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Congrats again, and I think we'll likely be chatting soon. I can't wait to see the rest of that hole.

Ivan Fairhall: Thank you, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

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