Au Gold (TSXV:AUGC) - Maiden Victorian Gold-Antimony Drilling Set for Late 2026

Marc Blythe (0:00)

Hi, good morning. My name is Marc Blythe. I'm the founder and CEO of Au Gold Corp. We're a small exploration company looking for gold and antimony at a Havelock project in Victoria, Australia.

Matt (0:10)

Marc, good to meet you. Thanks for having me on the platform. First time for you guys on here. It might be worth introducing yourself. So where have you been? What have you done? How is that relevant to what you're doing here?

Marc Blythe (0:21)

Well, that's a big question. So I'm actually a mining engineer by background. Cut my teeth in Australia and moved to Canada in the early 2000s with a company called Placidome.

And then when Placidome was taken over by Barrick in 2006, just stuck around in Vancouver. It was a great place to get involved in the smaller end of exploration and mining companies. And yeah, I've kind of morphed more into a geologist these days.

Matt (0:47)

Right.

And tell me, what are you doing? What's the idea? What have you picked up and how? Yeah.

Marc Blythe (0:55)

So as a consultant, I do diligence work for a number of companies, looking for projects or financing projects. So I'm always traveling around looking at things.

And I happened to, in 2024, make a visit to the Costerfield mine in Victoria and also the Sunday Creek project by Southern Cross Gold, which is a really interesting exploration story. They had great success with super high-grade neurovane, gold and antimony veins there. And then sometime after that, I started thinking, well, I wonder what's been missed in Victoria and started looking around. And the wonderful thing about the internet these days is lots of stuff is getting digitized and put online and started looking around and generated an idea, I guess you'd say, for a gold and antimony project in Victoria. And essentially, it was an old mine that had been mined in the 1880s, 1890s. And they'd had so much antimony in with the high-grade ore, the high-grade gold, but they couldn't separate it. And basically nobody's been back and explored there. And I thought, well, that'd be a great opportunity to go on and look for one of these gold antimony systems, which are potentially epizonal gold deposits, which we could talk about a little bit more detail if you like.

Matt (2:10)

Okay. So you said it was in line, but they struggled to separate the antimony from the gold. What data did you pick up to help you work out that perhaps you might be able to do something different with it?

Marc Blythe (2:23)

Well, that's quite an answer to that story. So we initially realised that they were kind of bound by the technologies of the day. They were really just using stamp battery, which is just crushing up the quartz and getting out the golden antimony and then using gravity to recover that gold. It wasn't even until 20 years later before cyanide began to be used in the district. But we kind of picked up these clues and then we engaged a research geologist to do extensive research on this area. And he went away and found all the old detailed records because there were actually a number of these mines along a trend that had operated in the 1880s and 1890s. There were actually individual public companies. So there were actually records that we could find. He did a fantastic job of reconstructing what all these old workings looked like, where the most interesting or most economic parts of these individual mines were.

And the stunning thing for me is that nobody had been there and drilled underneath these old mines, which because pumping technology was in its infancy, these mines are really very shallow. We're only talking 500 feet maximum, which is 160, 170 meters, which in today's terms are very shallow. And you look at the other mines in Victoria that are the same kind of geological model, Au Gold Antimony, Epizone Au Gold Deposits, such as Agnico Eagles, Fosterville Mine, Alcane Resources, Costerfield Mine, and Sunday Creek, which is Southern Cross Gold. They're all drilling or mining down to depths of over a kilometer. So there's great potential below these old workings.

Matt (4:10)

And okay, so there's lots of potential there, but you've got to make a commercial decision.

Can you get in and say, like, you know, were you able to, were there kind of drill results that you were able to look at or? No, there's nothing.

Marc Blythe (4:22)

It's really very subjective. There were, there are widths which are recorded in the historic data. And I think width is something that probably is the same now as it was then.