Rio Tinto Exploration Pty Ltd (Rio Tinto) took up the subject tenement at Douglas Creek, located ~ 20 km east of the central Peake and Denison Ranges, to explore the Palaeoproterozoic and Mesoproterozoic metamorphic basement rock sequence that it believed lies immediately beneath the blanket Mesozoic cover present there, with the aim of looking for large-scale, iron oxide - associated copper-gold (IOCG) deposits akin to the Olympic Dam, Ernest Henry and Candelaria discoveries. For all six of its adjoining Peake and Denison project licences, the company's key targeting criteria included deposit size (>500 Mt), grade (>2% Cu equivalent), and a modest depth of cover (200m), very conductive cover sequence, but gave no sulphide response. Because the nature of the Douglas Creek gravity anomaly remained unresolved, yet it clearly no longer fitted Rio Tinto's exploration model, the licensee decided to farm out a majority share in the exploration rights to another company with fresh objectives. No field work took place on EL 2751 during licence Years 2 and 3, while expressions of interest were sought. A project-wide joint venture with Phelps Dodge was entered into on 10/10/2003. Red Metal was appointed the JV's operator. After conducting a review and re-interpretation of the area's geophysical data, these companies decided to acquire a new detailed gravity survey to better define the Douglas Creek anomaly. 1192 stations were read during March 2004 at 200 m spacing along 29 lines totalling 238 line km. Based on this data, a drill site was selected ~14 km to the west of Rio Tinto's earlier attempt. During November 2004, a vertical rotary mud precollar hole, DCDH0401, was drilled at this site by Red Metal to a TD of 458.3 m. Proterozoic basement was entered at 455.5 m depth, and reaching this interim goal triggered the cessation of precollar hole construction. When a diamond coring rig was brought onsite in December 2005 to complete the drilling of basement (after the rig's priority involvement elsewhere during 2005 on other Project drilling), the coring phase could not be started due to a loose casing shoe, improperly set the year before at 430 m depth, which permitted unconsolidated Mesozoic aquifer sands to continually collapse into the open lower part of the hole, thus bogging the diamond core bit. Remedial cementing of the hole and casing lower annulus could not then be carried out by the diamond core rig due to the high artesian groundwater pressure, so the hole was temporarily abandoned. Subsequently, during September 2006, this damaged precollar drillhole was successfully rehabilitated by Red Metal using a specialist rotary mud drilling rig, and was converted to a water supply bore at the request of the landowner. The basement rock encountered by DCDH0401, underlying probable Algebuckina Sandstone, is a green-grey, foliated dolerite that is locally brecciated and chlorite(-epidote) altered, with carbonate veining. No other field work was conducted on the renewed Douglas Creek EL 3446 during licence Years 6, 7 and 8. Over most of this period Red Metal sought to divest its involvement in the licence to another explorer who would sole fund and manage future activities. Existing manager Phelps Dodge formally withdrew from the JV agreement on 12/1/2007. On 5/12/2008 Minotaur Exploration took up a purchase option agreement with Rio Tinto over EL 3446, and began field work in April 2009 to firm up further drill targets near Douglas Creek which it had identified from its proprietary 3D inversion modelling of the original 1 km x 1km regional gravity data. Two target locations were profiled with ground magnetic surveys read along 8 lines at 100m x 200 m station spacing, which gave modelled basement depths of around 400 m and 650 m respectively for the two 19 mGal residual gravity highs. It was decided to first drill the south-western, shallower target, from a site located ~5 km south of Nancy Bore, between and to the south of the sites of the earlier drilling attempts. To assist with funding this high risk, ~800 m deep third test of the 15 km x 2.5 km gravity anomaly at Douglas Creek, Minotaur applied for and was granted approval of a PACE Iniative subsidy from the SA Government, since the project had high greenfields exploration significance. During May-June 2009, as PACE Project DPY5-33 drilling programme operator, Minotaur successfully completed a single vertical HQ/NQ cored diamond drillhole, DC09D01, to 618.8 m total depth (including 400.75 m of rotary mud precollaring through the Great Artesian Basin aquifer sequence), after reaching the crystalline basement at 395 m depth and then penetrating 224 m into basement rocks that comprise a sequence of compositionally interlayered amphibolite-facies metasedimentary paragneisses. The three predominant interlayered lithologies are a hornblende-rich mafic gneiss, a pink siliceous gneiss and a quartz+feldspar+biotite gneiss, which are thought to represent, respectively, former calcareous, siliceous and psammopelitic units. They dip at 45-60 degrees and are interpreted to be stratigraphically equivalent to isolated exposures mapped near Spring Hill (north of Douglas Creek), which have an isotopic age of ~1750 Ma (Rogers and Freeman, 1996). Numerous pegmatite dykes were intersected low down in the drilled basement section, but dykes of other compositions are absent. No volcanic rocks were encountered. IOCG-style alteration of the basement is very common, being characteristically amphibole and epidote alteration, but red rock and potassium feldspar alteration are also present locally. Thin veins are common, and contain mostly amphibole, with lesser haematite, magnetite, garnet, epidote, feldspar and calcite. The age for this pervasive but variable IOCG-style alteration is not known. The alteration mineral assemblage is indicative of the passage of moderate-temperature fluids that were slightly hotter and were acting at greater crustal depths than those typically giving rise to the alteration products seen at Prominent Hill and Olympic Dam. No economic base metal sulphide minerals were observed in the drill core, and only traces of pyrite are present. Hand-held instrument petrophysical and geochemical measurements made on the crystalline basement rocks in the recovered HQ and NQ drill core did not return any significant anomalies. Although Minotaur's drillhole DC09D01 successfully retrieved 218 m of basement core from the extreme north-eastern margin of the Gawler Craton, where previous drilling is limited, that company considered the IOCG potential of the whole Douglas Creek prospect to have been substantially downgraded by the apparent complete absence of typical sulphide mineralisation. The altered, mafic-rich gneisses intersected were thought to adequately account for the local gravity anomaly drilled at the south-western end of the Douglas Creek prospect. No further work was performed on EL 3446 by Minotaur, who on 19/10/2009 withdrew from the farm-in and joint venture agreement with Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto assessed Minotaur's drilling results, and then also decided not to conduct any further exploration, before surrendering the licence on 30/4/2010.