Black Horse Mining (BHL)

Gold is having another moment. Rates are wobbling, currencies are swinging around, and Australian-dollar gold prices are still sitting comfortably. Explorers with real geology tend to stand out when the bigger picture feels unsettled. Victoria has been the surprise performer of the last decade, with deeper drilling at places like Fosterville, Costerfield and Sunday Creek showing that high-grade positions continue well below the old workings. Victorian deposits also have small surface footprints, low operating costs and some of the best margins in the country because they don’t require moving massive tonnages. Mt Egerton sits in that same story, just without the benefit of modern drilling.

Mt Egerton sits west of Melbourne and north of Ballarat, tucked inside one of the most productive gold belts in the state. The old miners pulled more than a million ounces out of the field, yet most of the drilling done since has barely scratched past 150 metres. Beneath the last stopes, the workings are still open. The deeper levels down to roughly 550 metres were only abandoned because pumps failed and capital dried up, not because the system was mined out. To the east, there are small lines of historic shafts that were barely explored because the original owners had different priorities. There are hundreds of pits and small shafts tracking those parallel trends, showing gold-bearing structures that were never tested with proper drilling. It’s the kind of ground where a few well-placed holes can change the scale of the whole story.

BHL’s first year is all about building that picture. They’ll map the old shafts properly, run ground-penetrating radar, fly new magnetics across the Egerton trend and the parallel structures, and then start dropping diamond holes into both shallow positions and deeper targets. The historical numbers are worth a fresh look: 7m at 18 g/t, 4m at 26 g/t, 10m at 10 g/t, 5m at 11 g/t, and several others with proper grade. None of it has been followed down-plunge with modern rigs. There’s room for repeats along strike as well. Several near-surface shoots were likely missed entirely because the old miners hit faults and simply lost the lode, leaving unmined positions only metres away from historic stopes. That same structural complexity is what allowed Southern Cross to grow its Victorian project into a multibillion-dollar company, and Mt Egerton shares the same geological architecture. It’s rare to get this much history with this little modern drilling.