Premier1 fires up gravity hunt for WA Murchison gold prizeAndrew ToddSponsoredThu, 5 March 2026 11:58AM
Premier1 has launched powerful gravity surveys at its Abbotts North gold project in Western Australia’s Murchison region, with the program designed to sharpen the structural controls around its Rochefort prospect in the burgeoning gold address.
The company says the high-resolution pictures generated by its geophysics will be used to fast-track priority drill targets at the prospect, which lies just 20 kilometres north of New Murchison Gold’s $700 million Crown Prince project.
The promising Rochefort target already carries a coherent gold-in-soil anomaly covering 400m by 350m, alongside high-grade rock chips that peak at 11.7 grams per tonne (g/t) gold.
Premier1 says an orientation survey to test extensions of the anomaly under shallow cover has now wrapped up, with assays due back shortly.
The prospect sits in the long-forgotten Abbotts greenstone belt in the northern Murchison, part of the same productive corridor that hosts Crown Prince’s currently 277,000 ounces of gold at a whopping 3.8g/t grade.
Crown Prince has moved rapidly from discovery into production, with ore now being trucked to Westgold’s Bluebird facility, 36km to the south.
The commencement of the gravity survey marks an important step in progressing Rochefort towards maiden drill testing. Rochefort displays all the classic signatures of a significant gold system.
Premier 1 exploration manager Paul Smith
Rochefort sits within highly fractionated and altered quartz dolerites that are renowned for generating strong gold flows within the tightly folded ultramafic rock sequences.
The company says its surface footprint, whilst small, compares in scale to the early-stage anomalies at high-grade deposits such as the Golden Mile, Rosemont and Paddington mines.
The Abbotts North project itself lies 35km north of Meekatharra, where mining 5km from the Abbotts centre historically delivered exceptional grades – around 41,000 ounces at 31g/t gold from shallow quartz reefs – yet the broader belt has seen almost no modern exploration on Premier1’s ground.
The company says past work was limited to reconnaissance, soil sampling and minor rotary air blast drilling, leaving its key structural corridors largely untested at depth.
Premier1 is also hard at work in the southwest at its Yalgoo gold project, with reverse circulation (RC) programs continuing in parallel.
The company recently kicked off some 3700m of RC drilling at its Mt Kersey gold prospect, one of the few remaining gold targets in the prolific West Australian Yalgoo greenstone belt that have been barely touched.
With the gravity survey refining targets, gold results imminent and maiden drilling now on the horizon, Premier1’s Abbotts North programs are breathing new life into a region of WA, ripe for gold discovery.
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