LOCATION & HISTORY

The Tooloom Gold Project is located in the far northeast of New South Wales, about 70km northwest of Casino and within about 30km of the Queensland border. The project is wholly owned by Malachite and encompasses about 550 km² of prospective ground in three mining leases and surrounding and adjoining exploration licences (EL 6263 and ELA 2879).

Gold was first discovered at Tooloom in 1857 and within a few years up to 10,000 people were mining gold from alluvial deposits in the area, attracted by the coarse grain size of the gold and the abundance of nuggets that characterise the district. At that time little attention was paid to the hard rock sources of the alluvial gold and when the easily won stream bed material was largely worked out the miners drifted away, many of them to the newly discovered Gympie goldfield some 260km to the north in Queensland. Tooloom then slipped into obscurity and remained there until very recently, even though small scale alluvial gold mining continued until 2001.

Malachite became involved at Tooloom in 1997, when it recognised that the area represented a major goldfield which had seen no significant modern exploration. Evidence of prior mining of alluvial gold in stream beds is widespread at Tooloom but relict old workings in hard rock are relatively few and most are of very small scale. An initial field inspection of some of these old workings, which are scattered over an area stretching more than 30km from north to south and 5 to 10km east-west, revealed that most are clearly associated with intrusive rocks. The Company was particularly attracted to the size and intensity of the gold-bearing mineral system exposed in outcrop at what is now known as Frasers prospect. Elsewhere, gold could be seen to occur in linear structural zones. There was clearly scope for both bulk tonnage and high grade vein type deposits at Tooloom, and it was apparent from the outset that the district had the potential to yield a world class gold discovery. Phoenix, at that stage, was completely unknown.

Much of the Tooloom area is rugged, with up to 400m of relief. The southern part of the goldfield is forest covered, while in the north the topography is less severe and much of the land has been cleared. Cattle grazing is the main land use throughout, although some timber harvesting occurs in the wooded areas and crops are grown on a large alluvial flat in the north. Exploration of the Tooloom area provides some physical challenges and many parts of the area can only be accessed on foot. Due to the lack of prior exploration, there were no local geological maps available to Malachite when exploration began and almost no published or open file data on which to base an exploration program. For this reason, the Company’s approach has been very systematic, utilising techniques that have commonly been applied to grass roots exploration of previously unexplored areas in the islands of the Southwest Pacific.

>> Geology of the Tooloom area