Australasian PGM sector needs dash of Fipke magic

In the mid 1980s, the man who later undertook the great geological detective work that put Canada on the world diamond map, was in the deep south of New Zealand, in conditions as cold as, but a lot wetter than, he was accustomed to.

Charles Fipke was a field geologist working for Sigma Resources, an explorer foisted on to the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) by then-emerging gold producer Delta Gold.

At the time, platinum was a hot second item for gold floats, which, in those heady days of Australasia’s gold boom, were being cranked out every week on the ASX. There were great aspirations for Australia, and somewhat lesser ones for New Zealand, on the basis of the region’s large, under-explored, layered ultramafic systems.

Stockbrokers backing the new wave of junior companies were an excitable bunch who saw plenty of blue sky for platinum group metals despite the negligible history of exploration in Australasia.

A sniff was not hard to get. Tangible targets for substantial platinum group metals — whether they be geological mirrors of South Africa’s famous Bushveld Complex, Alaskan-style deposits found at Fifield in New South Wales, or the new gold-platinum style found at Coronation Hill — were proving a rarity.

This secondary platinum rush gradually diminished in Australia, while, in New Zealand, the Sigma quest in the Southland region of the South Island hit a bureaucratic brick wall.

New Zealand in the 1980s not only had a large contingent of anti-miners (still a force on the South Island), but, as well, an army of flat-earth thinkers in government. This made the processing of mineral claims and procedures somewhere between painful and impossible.

Pierre Trudeau, then the Canadian prime minister, had introduced an array of daft business and taxation proposals that sent Canadian explorers to Australia and did a good job of turning geologists back home into taxi drivers. Yet not even he could have dreamed up the complex legislation that retarded exploration in New Zealand.

Delta Gold was run by Peter Vanderspuy, a South African who also had a link to the Canadian mining corporate scene. Vanderspuy lost patience trying to prove up targets in Southland, so Sigma was absorbed into Delta and the funds were applied to gold developments in Australia. This created the bricks for Vanderspuy to turn Delta into one of Australia’s low-cost gold producers, and one of the new faces on the international platinum scene.

Delta secured vast tracts of the Great Dyke in Zimbabwe, and from this emerged the Hartley platinum project (a partnership with Australia’s Broken Hill Proprietary) and targets such as the Ngezi property.

Delta is now separating its gold and platinum assets with the Zimbabwean Platinum Mines (Zimplats) float, which will be an ASX listing and eventually raise capital for a London listing.

One of the areas that Sigma-Delta had to give up in New Zealand was the Longwood complex, near Invercargill. The project had remained fallow for a decade until it was picked up by Australian enterpreneur Don Hoult, who is affiliated with Vancouver-based Anzex Resources (AZX-V).

Hoult, who must be hoping to improve on his gold boom forays in the Australian state of Queensland, sensed that platinum was coming back into fashion. He knew, too, that global reserves were solid but not excessive, and that New Zealand had streamlined its mining laws and introduced a Resource Management Act.

Anzex is regarded by many in New Zealand’s small mining community as a great white hope for a country in which mining has been contracted. The market is currently awaiting details on three holes drilled by the company on the Longwood complex.

While respected New Zealand geologist Russell Bluck may have stepped back from the Anzex quest, the local fraternity of geoscientists is pleased that Prof. Anthony Naldrett is on the board. This Canadian specialist in the fields of nickel and platinum group metals undertook significant work in his formative years in the nickel fields of Western Australia.

If positive results come from the early work by Anzex, it will be a catalyst for other hopefuls who hold layered complexes elsewhere on New Zealand’s South Island. These include Blackstone Resources (BZZ-A), which, in partnership with Glenhaven Resources (GGNN-A), is exploring the Pahia property that surrounds Longwood and the Takitimu mountain ranges, and Prophecy Mining, an unlisted New Zealand company run by Peter Atkinson, chairman of Heritage Gold. Prophecy holds the Waiau River licence in Southland and has just acquired a large property in the northern sector of the island.

Two former Sigma geologists who tramped the scrub with Chuck Fipke in the 1980s are Peter Waterman of Auckland and Peter Nicolson of Wakatipu, near Queensland. They have pooled their properties, which include the Rotoroa complex in the Nelson Lakes area and the Bluff complex, just south east of Invercargill. Waterman and Nicolson joint-ventured their properties with Spectrum Resources (SPC-V), which is also listed in New Zealand.

— The author is the chief executive of Perth-based Louthean Publishing, which publishes Gold Mining Journal and Paydirt. He is also the editor of the Australian Mines Handbook, Mineral Resources of New Zealand and South African Mines Handbook.