This PACE-subsidised drilling project aimed to discover a new copper-gold mineralised Iron Oxide Copper Gold (IOCG) magmatic centre, similar to that which forms the setting of the Olympic Dam deposit, but lying within the northern margin of the Curnamona Province. The drilling of a single deep hole to 900 m was proposed for testing a very intense, structurally controlled gravity residual high anomaly (measuring up to 19.0 mGal) which is associated with a flat or low magnetic response located between two regionally significant, craton - scale faults trending NW and NE. It was considered that this particular target has a similar regional setting, geophysical properties and scale to the giant Olympic Dam deposit. At the Super Nova 1 drill site, located ~20 km east of Moolawatana Homestead, vertical rotary mud drilling through the cover, initiated in May 2005, was completed to blade refusal at 425.0 m depth. Below this point the hole was cored in PQ for another 1.5 m, passing from Cretaceous Bulldog Shale into pre-Phanerozoic basement. No artesian aquifers were encountered while drilling the Tertiary or Mesozoic basinal sequences. One metre of drill core sampled from the bottom of hole comprised scapolite - altered limestone typical of the Adelaidean Arkaroola Sub-Group, which on the exposed Mount Painter Block to the west overlies the prospective Middle Proterozoic basement rocks. Large diameter casing was set to 130 m depth, or within the lower part of the Tertiary Namba Formation. However, a string of smaller diameter casing, intended to be set right to the bottom of the precollar hole, became unthreaded, or burst apart at a joint, during placement and hence was unable to be run down into the basement. Because no artesian aquifers had been intersected in the precollar section, it was decided that the hole would be left uncased from 130 m to 427.5 m depth. Unfortunately, later attempts in October 2005 to extend the corehole with HQ and NQ rods further into the basement, using a conventional diamond rig, had to be abandoned due to the continual collapse, from around 136 m depth, of this uncased pre-collar portion of the hole. Red Metal shortly afterward completed a second drill test into the western portion of the large gravity anomaly, at a site within a separate adjoining tenement, on the Red Giant prospect. This technically successful drillhole penetrated a continuous interval of moderately dense (estimated S.G. 2.9-3.2) quartz - feldspar - calcite metasediments, which have been overprinted by strong metasomatic calc-silicate ± garnet alteration, from 434.6 m to a final hole depth of 752.3 m. Results obtained from the Red Giant and Super Nova holes suggest that the source of the regional gravity anomaly is most likely due to a regional basement high of dense calc-silicate - rich rocks. The intense calc-silicate - feldspar - magnetite alteration seen in RGDH05-01 is typical of the early regional Na-Fe-Ca-K alteration seen in other prospective IOCG terrains around the world, and although not mineralised, has confirmed the regional IOCG potential of the northern Curnamona district.