Aureka is aiming to unlock a golden treasure chest lying beneath Victoria’s surface.
Victoria has become a hive of exploration in recent years, as junior miners look to discover the next Swan Zone – one of the world’s highest-grade gold deposits.
Aureka is one such company, with a suite of gold projects that could enter production in the coming years.
A name change from Navarre Minerals in late 2024 signalled a new direction for a company that has been focused on Victorian gold for years. The new moniker combines ‘Au’, the chemical symbol for gold, and ‘Eureka’, a common expression when a discovery was made during the Victorian gold rush in the 1800s.
“Through the name change, we really wanted to acknowledge that while a lot of small companies pivot to the next best thing, whether it be a different commodity or jurisdiction, we haven’t done that,” Aureka managing director James Gurry told Australian Mining.
“Having accumulated several projects across the state, we’re committed to bringing Victoria’s gold to life, because there’s far more gold to be found. ‘Aureka’ captures that sense of discovery.”
Aureka is represented by its Irvine, Tandarra, St Arnaud and Jubilee gold projects in Victoria, each of which is proximate to known goldfields. And these are not early-stage projects.
“We’ve inherited a lot of existing discoveries made by the previous team,” Gurry said.
“The accounts show that $30 million of work has been done on these discoveries, with $20 million spent on the Irvine project.”
Image: Aureka
A notable discovery made by the previous team is the Resolution lode within the Irvine project, with Resolution boasting an inferred JORC resource (announced in March 2021) of 264,000 ounces (oz) at 2.61 grams per tonne (g/t) gold. Aureka commenced drilling at its Irvine project in January, followed by drilling at Tandarra in February.
With little drilling completed at Irvine since Navarre released the project’s March 2021 resource estimate, Aureka is eager to maximise past successes.
“We identified last year during planning that the southern shoots at the Resolution lode have real potential, and we want to test how good the grades get at depth,” Gurry said.
Aureka is focused on an Irvine exploration target containing 280,000–420,000oz at 2–3g/t gold, with the hope of bringing some of these projected mineralisation into the existing JORC resource.
“We want to grow the size of Irvine project and see if the project’s two lodes, Resolution and Adventure, link up,” Gurry said.
The Tandarra project is located near Bendigo in the same region as the Fosterville mine, a more “recently famous” area of gold mining that has produced 22 million ounces of in the past.
“Tandarra has relatively shallow cover, meaning there’s not much topsoil and dirt to drill through before you hit fresh rock and potential mineralisation,” Gurry said.
“The project adjoins the well-known Four Eagles discovery, made by Catalyst Metals and Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting. They’ve already defined 160,000 ounces at eight grams per tonne, and within that there’s a subset of 70,000 ounces at a super high grade of 26 grams per tonne.
Image: Aureka
“We’ll be testing some of the northern reaches of the Tandarra tenement to see if it links up to some of the Four Eagles mineralisation. We’ve already identified, through the Whitelaw corridor, that there’s huge potential at Tandarra.”
The priority for Aureka, according to Gurry, is continuous drilling and exploration in the short-term, ensuring the company has one diamond drill rig operating at all times.
“We’ve got 7000 metres of diamond drilling occurring over the coming 12 months, and on top of that we’ve got around 6000 metres of aircore drilling, so it’s a huge amount of drilling that we’ve got planned and underway,” he said. “The key thing for us is to continually update the market on the work we’re doing, and hopefully by the second half of the year we have enough Irvine drilling and results under our belt to update the March 2021 JORC resource.
“Ultimately, I want the company to be looking at one million ounces of JORC resources across our projects within 12 months.”
This feature appeared in the April 2025 issue of Australian Mining.