ECR Minerals (ECR ) has discovered coarse gold at the Brothers Mining Licence area in Queensland.
Prospecting using metal detectors in a 2,100 metre north-south zone incorporating the Brothers Mining Licence area has recovered multiple gold nuggets from 26 sites ranging from 0.1 grams to 12.3 grams in weight.
The prospecting results provide an encouraging early indication of the alluvial potential surrounding the Brothers Mining Licence area and at the Mining Licence itself and supports the company’s plans to undertake more systematic trial processing in the area.
As previously announced, equipment acquired as part of the Raglan transaction is also being redeployed to the Maddens Flat area, providing ECR with the plant and machinery required to advance this next phase of testing.
The prospecting of the area is planned to continue, particularly westwards into a creek the company has named Elliot Creek, in memory of the Lone Wolf prospector, Sam Elliot, who worked this part of the West Normanby Goldfields.
This creek drains an extensive area of old prospecting workings visible in the 2026 drone LiDAR surveys, called the Elliot Anomalous Area. This is considered to be one of the most isolated and underexplored areas of the Maddens Exploration Licence.
The Brothers Mining Lease forms part of the wider Maddens Flat Group of Mines project area and contains both historic underground workings and prospective surface alluvial ground.
ECR intends to test the alluvial gravels across selected areas of the Brothers Mining Lease in order better to understand gold distribution, recovery characteristics and the potential scale of the opportunity.
“The prospecting has confirmed the alluvial potential of the south-east of our exploration area, and it is encouraging to see that the most prospective creek drains directly into our alluvial zone at the Brothers Project,” said ECR chairman Nick Tulloch.
“What makes the opportunity particularly interesting is the nature of the ground. The material we have seen is predominantly loose sand and gravel, and we now have access to equipment that will allow us to test this opportunity on a more systematic basis. We are deliberately taking a measured approach. The next step is to move from prospecting to representative bulk sampling and trial processing so that we can better understand recoveries, grade distribution and the potential scale of the alluvial system.”
View from Vox
Good progress from ECR on several levels at Brothers, and encouraging to see gold nuggets uncovered on such a scale. That bodes well for a more extensive mining operation as and when it comes, and with the deployment of equipment from Raglan the company is about to add real strength in depth to its activities at Brothers.