News

January 20, 2009

Tally-Ho! Spitfire Resources Intercepts A Rich Seam Of Manganese Down On South Woodie Woodie

By Our Man in Oz

Over 40 years ago field workers from the Geological Survey of Western Australia noted on their hand-drawn maps an outcrop of manganese-rich rock in the region known today as South Woodie Woodie. From that day in the mid 1960s, until a few months ago, the outcrop was “lost”. It wasn’t, of course. Rocks don’t disappear. The problem was that the old maps didn’t agree with the information provided by a more modern tool, a satellite-tuned global positioning system (GPS). People being people, the inevitable tendency was to dismiss the old maps and to believe the latest technology. If the GPS said there was not an outcrop where there ought to have been an outcrop, then it must never have existed at all. Oh dear, what a mistake. The mistake has, however, been made good by a bit of old-fashioned exploration, better known as walking around, over this, some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain.

Last year, without fanfare, the “lost” outcrop was re-discovered by a team of Indonesian-trained geologists working for the small Australian manganese and coal explorer, Spitfire Resources. It was a “eureka” moment, Spitfire executive chairman, James Hamilton, tells Minesite’s Man in Oz over a crisp sauvignon blanc and calabrase pizza at the curiously-named Funtastico restaurant in Perth’s inner suburb of Subiaco. “We were pretty sure that what the Geological Survey had noted had to be...