FIJI: New gold find at Raki Raki
Updated
Significant new finds of gold have been made in Fiji, at Raki Raki on the main island of Viti Levu. The finds were made by Australian exploration company, Geopacific Resources, which has a joint venture operation with Peninsula Minerals. Geopacific Resources Managing Director, Ian Pringle, says new technology is opening up a lot of mining opportunities in Fiji.
Presenter: Jemima Garrett
Speakers: Doctor Ian Pringle, Managing Director Geopacific Resources
PRINGLE: We've found a near surface, lowish grade gold intersections, but right close to the surface and very encouraging at an early stage of exploration for potentially an economic resource. We've got a low way to go yet of course.
GARRETT: So you say your quite excited about these finds and they could be similar to the Vatukoula gold. What makes you say that?
PRINGLE: That's correct. Vatukoula is a large gold mine's been operating for a little bit of 70 odd years and it's located about 30 kilometres further to the west of us. But it has a very, very similar rocks, a very similar style of tectonic setting to where we are at Raki Raki and we're very excited that in Vatukoula is a very large resource. It's been mined as I said for a long time and it contains several million ounces of gold. So if we can find a much smaller deposit to Vatukoula, but near the surface, it may become an economic deposit. So we've got a lot of work to do to determine that, but because it's very similar geological setting, we're very, very confident that it may turn out to be a larger mineral find.
GARRETT: You have other exploration sites in Fiji at Nadi, Nuku and Vunda. What potential do they hold?
PRINGLE: Again they are exploration. We've got a drilling program at the moment at Walola which is in the Nuku area north of Suva and we're looking at gold and zinc targets there and we're onto our second hold of a program there. We've been drilling at Kundi, which is inland from Latoka and that's got quite a bit of gold at surface and we've had a number of drilling phases at Kundi over the last year or two and some mixed success and we've still got a lot of work to do there. We've completed a large geophysical survey at Kunda and we've found that the geophysics has helped us a lot. It's also helped us at Raki Raki to locate areas of interest there. We're using a new geophysical techniques that really have been developed only over the last five or six years.
GARRETT: Do you expect to see more interest from mining companies in gold and copper and so forth in Fiji?
PRINGLE: I would be surprised if there's not. There's already been a lot of interest at the large Namosi deposit, which is a very large but very low grade copper deposit just to the west of Suva. And Namosi is not yet proven to be commercially viable, but I understand there is a lot of interest there. But Fiji is really missed out on the last 10 and 15 years of modern exploration. There's a lot of new geophysical techniques in particular, but also analytical techniques, geo-chemical techniques that have developed just over the last 10 or 15 years and new exploration models. And there hasn't been a lot of recent exploration Fijians incorporating those techniques into exploration programs. So we see there's a bit opportunity to do that sort of work in Fiji and I'm sure other companies will.
Geopacific is a relatively new public company. We really just listed and raised some money on the Australian stock exchange about 18 months ago and we're focused on Fiji. We see Fiji as having a lot of potential for new discoveries and we have six geologists working at the moment. We only work within Fiji and all of our projects are on the main island of Viti Levu.
