Company’s board to decide on gold rush

Press, 10 March 1984, Page 29

Company’s board to decide on gold rush

rA Dunedin The board of the Welling-ton-based Bronze Boulder Company, Ltd, will decide next week if a rush to recover gold from part of the Upper Clutha River will proceed. The gold, from several kilometres of river upstream of Bendigo, would have to be mined before much of the area is flooded by the proposed high dams at Queensbury and Luggate. The company is talking of mining on a small to medium scale, but this would still return millions of dollars worth of gold. The general manager of Bronze Boulder, Mr Keith Walshe, said the company had spent $lOO,OOO on the Upper Clutha explorations in the last two years. “We are faced with a time limit because of the dams, and so decisions will have to be made as quickly as possible,” he said. “If the mining is not done soon it will not be done at all.”

The company’s board will decide whether to apply for a mining licence, and on the proposed scale of works. “There is at this stage insufficient gold for a large-

scale operation,” Mr Walshe said. Tests have returned 4.5 to seven grains of gold per cu m of material. Each smallscale plant would process about 250,000 cu m. With an average return of, say, five grains, with gold at $6OO, this would return more than $1.5 million a year for each plant. Mr Walshe said the time changing from an exploration to a mining licence was a big problem, the planning process perhaps taking a year or more. If the choice went to an intermediate-scale operation delays could also occur because the machinery had to be imported. A spoon-type dredge worked on the river up to Albert Town about 80 years ago and hand-miners had been at work on the riverbanks.

Mr Walshe said the recoverable gold was above the level worked by the dredge and relatively shallow. The company was also drilling holes through the barren ground, which was dredged, to see if sufficient gold was there. Mr Walshe said smallscale mining would prob-

ably be from floating plants working from the bank, and covering wet and dry riverbed areas. Bronze Boulder was a New Zealand-owned company with private shareholding. The public were welcome to pan for gold at Maori Point between Luggage and Tarras, Mr Walshe said.

C.R.A., Australia’s secondbiggest mining company, also has prospecting licences on parts of the Clutha River which will be flooded, and has been investigating these areas. Several other companies are active in the area.