It was once the richest silver property in Australia prior to the discovery of Broken Hill, producing 3.5 million ounces of silver and a healthy 140,000oz of gold between 1875 and 1922, primarily from the Sunny Corner mine itself.
In fact, the Sunny Corner tenements were originally only sought after for their gold and silver potential, with early miners allowing copper, lead and zinc mineralisation to go to waste, in some cases at grades of up to 30% combined metal.
Golden Cross picked up the property as part of a package of nine exploration licences in NSW three years ago when another junior explorer Michelago was looking to join the dot.com movement.
Michelago sold the nine licences for 1.8 million Golden Cross shares and the old mining leases were acquired from Rimfire Resources for 100,000 shares when Rimfire switched to diamond exploration.
Previous explorers at Sunny Corner concluded that the region's gold and silver mineralisation was the product of an ancient volcanic-hosted massive sulphide (VHMS) deposited on the seafloor some 420 million years ago. The mineralisation was thought to have been deposited at the interface between the volcanic and sedimentary rocks.
Timms said Golden Cross had not discounted this theory, and said the origin of the mineralisation would evolve as more geological evidence became available from the current drilling program.
"There is no doubt that the old mine is hosted in a very large zone of crustal deformation and that the faults within this zone exert considerable control on the distribution of ore-grade minerals," Timms said.
"Sunny Corner is really an amazing situation, the grade of the Sunny Corner massive sulphides was exceptionally high, particularly for silver and gold, averaging 630-790gpt silver and 4-6gpt gold.
"Surprisingly, quite a few companies in the past have had a crack at it, but none of them have really drilled under the old workings.
"Right now we are just feeling our way around the property, but hopefully our drilling will locate an orebody of high grade material similar to that mined at the turn of the 20th century."
Unfortunately for Golden Cross it took some time between first striking the deal with Michelago in 2000 and actually consolidating tenure into a new exploration licence, which was granted in August 2002.
The NSW drought and high fire risk in the area prevented all but basic reconnaissance work until about April of this year. However, in recent months the company has dramatically accelerated its drilling campaign.
Already the company has completed two drilling programs, including an RC program since the end of September to follow up the previous reconnaissance work and attempt to find the extensions of the old orebody.
Better intersections from the first program uncovered 14m at 3.5gpt gold and 144gpt silver but perhaps more interestingly 0.7% copper, 6% lead and 10.4% zinc.
* This report, first published in the November/December edition of RESOURCESTOCKS magazine, was commissioned and paid for by Golden Cross Resources
