Broken Hill lifts SA gold resource as deeper sulphides beckon

Broken Hill Gold has put considerably more meat on the bones of the company’s restart ambitions in South Australia, lifting the indicated oxide gold resource at its Vertigo prospect by 160 per cent after a major infill and resource-expansion drilling push.

Vertigo is one of the historical open pits at the company’s 100 per cent-owned White Dam gold project, 80km west of Broken Hill in the Curnamona Province. The deposit now packs a total indicated and inferred resource of 2.30 million tonnes at 0.74 grams per tonne (g/t) gold for 54,795 ounces, a healthy 43 per cent jump on its 2020 estimate. Importantly, the higher-confidence indicated component has swelled to 1.43Mt at 0.53g/t for 24,300 ounces, with the mineralisation either outcropping or sitting shallow within an existing mining lease.

Broken Hill completed 279 reverse circulation (RC) holes totalling 13.5km during 2025–26, with 51 per cent of those drilling metres used to calculate the new estimate. Combined with historical data validation and improved geological interpretation, the work added ounces and helped convert inferred material to indicated.

Across White Dam, the global resource now stands at 5.2Mt at 0.7g/t for 118,496 gold ounces, including 43,500 ounces in the indicated category. The Vertigo update is the first of three oxide gold resource recalculations from the drilling campaign.

Management says the new ounces could provide the feed for a restart of the Vertigo open pit, with the shallow, weathered material well suited to White Dam’s existing heap-leach operation, where cyanide solution is passed through crushed ore to extract the gold. Historical records show a recovery rate of 80.2 per cent from saprolite and partly weathered transitional ore, although a Vertigo-specific rate cannot be calculated because its material was originally co-stacked with ore from another White Dam deposit.

White Dam brings useful brownfields pedigree to the equation. It produced roughly 180,000oz from 7.5Mt at 0.94g/t between 2010 and 2018 and retains pits, heap-leach infrastructure and processing facilities, giving a viable restart a head start over a greenfields build.

Broken Hill Gold managing director Matthew Boyes said: “The real story developing here at White Dam is the sulphide gold potential this system contains. We know we have ~55koz of gold in mineral resource at Vertigo already, with the grade increasing as we go deeper.”

The story gets even more intriguing with depth. Below that weathered gold zone lies the potential for a fresh-rock gold-copper sulphide system carrying both gold and copper. Vertigo’s thick tabular mineralised zone dips at 15 degrees and remains open beyond the pit limits, with gold and copper grades increasing down-dip, similar to the company’s nearby Icebreaker deposit.

Icebreaker recently helped rewrite the geological script at White Dam after drilling revealed gold-copper sulphides hidden beneath a field historically geared to shallow oxide mining. The standout results included 28m at 2.4g/t gold and 0.7 per cent copper from 93m, including 16m at 3.5g/t gold and 0.9 per cent copper from 96m.