An area covering parts of west-central Lake Torrens and Andamooka Island was taken up by Pima Mining because it was considered a strategic acreage acquisition, since it adjoins the southern boundary of the company's EL 2528 Andamooka already issued to cover a more northerly part of Lake Torrens. Subsequently commissioned aeromagnetic and other geophysical data interpretations made by specialist consultants identified a significant, 18 km x 12 km magnetic anomaly occupying the northern end of the subject tenement, EL 2533, and extending into EL 2528. It coincides with a 17 mGal amplitude Bouguer gravity anomaly - for comparison, the Olympic Dam orebody is associated with a 12 mGal gravity anomaly. This primary target is coincident with the Torrens Hinge Zone, and abuts the Olympic Dam Tectonic Corridor to the north-west. It is believed to have the potential to host a large-scale, economic Cu-U-Au deposit comparable to Olympic Dam. During licence Year 1, initial reconnaissance surface rock chip geochemical sampling (6 samples) carried out in the south-western portion of the licence area failed to identify any significant gold or base metal anomalism, and therefore in May 1999 tenure of this ground was dropped. However, re-assaying of 271 samples of drill core from historic diamond hole TD2 drilled in late 1981 by Western Mining Corp., which is located within the retained licence portion, returned significantly anomalous copper values including 9.5 m @ 0.4% Cu, 3 m @ 1.15% Cu and 7.5 m @ 0.23% Cu. Other anomalous trace metal values that were detected included 0.5 m @ 77 ppm Ag and 1 m @ 0.25% Pb. The zinc and rare earths content is also elevated, but that of gold and uranium is not. 8 selected drill core samples from TD2 and another 7 from the nearby WMC hole TD3 were examined petrographically, and low pressure / moderate temperature hydrothermal alteration was described that has affected both brecciated pre-Adelaidean metasediments and the underlying, veined and brecciated ?Gawler Range Volcanics equivalent acid volcanic rocks. Processing of high resolution aeromagnetic profile data covering the Bosworth licence area was performed with the aim of generating a three-dimensional picture of the magnetic basement and defining the positions of major crustal lineaments. Four main structural features were identified that appeared to persist with depth, one striking north-northwest, the second striking north-west, the third north-east and the fourth west-northwest. During the second licence year, work undertaken by Minotaur as EL 2533 manager comprised: • surveying in accurate location fixes for historic drillhole collars and surface grids utilising DGPS (~5 m accuracy); • reprocessing all existing gravity and aeromagnetic datasets for in-house interpretation; • submitting a Declaration of Environmental Factors needed for gaining PIRSA's approval for the JV partners to undertake a proposed tenement-wide regional and infill gravity survey to be conducted in the most part on the bed of Lake Torrens; and • commencing formal Native Title negotiations for obtaining land access consent from the area's traditional custodians. It was hoped that the gravity survey could commence in late May 2000 and take around three weeks to acquire all of the readings from ~2500 stations. During the third licence year, Minotaur's work comprised: • making presentations to Native Title claimant groups about the proposed activities; • obtaining environmental protection stakeholder approvals for the proposed gravity survey on the bed of Lake Torrens; and • calling tenders for acquiring the gravity survey. Despite environmental approvals being obtained from both PIRSA and National Parks for the JV to carry out the proposed gravity survey, two out of the three Native Title claimant groups which all have overlapping claims to the lake area, the Kokatha and the Barngala, indicated that they would not entertain “exploration activities” being undertaken on the lake floor. As a consequence, the planned gravity survey was aborted. Discussions were continued with the Kokatha and Barngala claimants, but without any change of their attitude resulting. During the fourth licence year, attempts to engage with the three Native Title claimant groups were continued, unsuccessfully. Various corporate strategies were initiated, including making approaches to the SA Minister of Mines through PIRSA, all to no avail. No other technical work was undertaken. As a consequence of not being able to gain access for realising the JV work commitments, Kelaray terminated the joint venture agreement with Minotaur Resources and BHP Billiton on 1/8/2002, and management responsibility for EL 2533 reverted to Kelaray. During licence Years 5 through 8 (2003-2007), no material work could be done on the licence area. But on 22/10/2003, Straits Exploration (Australia) Pty Ltd entered into a joint venture with Kelaray for the Bosworth licence, seeking to earn up to a 70% interest in it, and soon began putting in place extensive preparations which might allow the partners to acquire the needed detailed geophysical survey data and firm up sites for drilling three exploratory wells that would further probe the basement geology of the Torrens prospect. Ongoing negotiations with the Native Title claimants were supported by the conduct of much research into environmental matters, indigenous heritage, low impact exploration techniques and improved logistics for resuming field work. On 26/9/2006, Straits applied to PIRSA for the grant of $100,000 of PACE Initiative Year 4 collaborative drilling subsidy funds to assist with the planned drill programme for the Torrens Project. On 4/12/2006, the grant of a subsidy to support drilling proposal DPY4-20 was approved by PIRSA, but only to the level of $80,000. During licence Year 9, a considerable amount of new work took place: • Numerous meetings and discussions were held by the JV partners with staff from PIRSA, the Department for Environment and Heritage, indigenous heritage consultants, industry representatives and station managers/owners; • The causeway giving access to Andamooka Island was repaired jointly by Straits and BHP Billiton. A new fourteen man temporary camp was constructed on the island, after existing access tracks to the old campsite had been graded / improved to enable the portable accommodation modules and other camp and drilling infrastructure to be trucked there. Straits performed rehabilitation of the former WMC campsite environment, and removed waste that had been left behind on the island from the previous drilling (e.g. 700 m of steel cable); • The original water supply bore that had been drilled in 1979 by WMC (? no. 6436/4) was found to be blocked underground, when Straits arrived to inspect the infrastructure on the island. This bore was entered and carefully cleaned out over three days by the JV's drilling contractor Boart Longyear, and its flow was subsequently re-established to supply water for the planned diamond drilling; • Photo monitoring points were set up at various locations on EL 3195 to capture evidence of Straits' exploration impact on the environment. Photos are being taken on a monthly basis; • Meetings and heritage protection clearance surveys at planned worksites were held with members of the Kokatha, Kuyani and Barngarla people and with their respective legal representatives (lawyers and anthropologists); • In the third quarter of 2006, Declarations of Environmental Factors were submitted to PIRSA and DEH for each of the proposed ground gravity survey, proposed drilling on Andamooka Island, and proposed drilling on Lake Torrens, successive stages of the imminent exploration programme. Six month duration approvals for these documents were given progressively, the last on 10/12/2007 for drilling on the lake. • Starting in August 2007, and continuing in field sorties every couple of months until December 2007, ground gravity survey data were acquired over the Torrens prospect to infill historic WMC data that had been collected at 1 km x 100 m station spacings, but was judged to be too coarse to give accurate targeting. The main gravity coverage of 882 stations at 500 m x 250 m spacing had to be read when lake surface conditions were dry/hard enough in places to allow passage along the survey lines via quad bike, but eventually a third of the stations could be completed only by using a lighter weight trike bike with a suitably low breakthrough ground pressure (much less than a human body weight would exert via a foot placed on the salt crust). A hovercraft was also trialled by survey contractor Solo Geophysics, but it seems that this transport mode was unsatisfactory. Following inspection of the new gravity data, a further 238 closer spaced stations were acquired during February 2008 in specific anomalous areas, again using the trike bike. • In parallel to this, over the period October to November 2007, a fixed wing airborne detailed magnetic / radiometric survey totalling 1684 line km was flown over EL 3195 along east-west flight lines 200 m apart, using a 50 m mean terrain clearance. • When all of the new survey data were to hand, expert consultant Jim Hanneson of Adelaide Mining Geophysics was retained to review and interpret them. He identified many potential IOCG type anomalies of varying sizes and source burial depths, and he recommended 15 of them as good quality drill targets, five being located under Andamooka Island and the other ten lying under Lake Torrens. • A deep diamond drilling campaign was conducted by Straits from November 2007 to February 2008, when 3 differently inclined and directed exploratory holes which were collared on Andamooka Island were successively completed for a total penetration of 3035 m. The drill sites lay on the north-eastern side of the island, ~5 km west of WMC's former TD2 hole location, and were positioned just inside the 100 m wide land strip exclusion zone running along the lake shoreline. Hole TD4 was drilled to 1198 m total length at a declination of minus 80 degrees towards true north, to investigate Jim Hanneson's Body 27 target. After drilling through the surficial sediments to 13.9 m using rotary mud methods, the remainder of the hole was continuously cored in HQ followed by NQ2 gauge diamond drilling. However, the target was not intersected due to the hole's trajectory staying too steep throughout, causing it to miss and pass by on the body's inferred southern side. Shortly afterwards, hole TD5 was wedged-off from TD4 at 513 m depth in order to re-attempt drilling to intersect the centre of Body 27. It started on a similarly steep trajectory with an NQ coring string, but was gradually lifted through the use of directional drilling techniques while coring with NQ2 equipment until it reached a final hole length of 1183 m, when the dip angle was minus 50.3 degrees. The last-completed hole, TD6, was drilled to a hole total length of 1154.3 m at a declination of minus 65 degrees towards the north-west, to investigate Jim Hanneson's Body 115 target. After drilling through the surficial sediments to 5.2 m using rotary mud methods, the remainder of the hole was continuously cored in HQ followed by NQ2 gauge diamond drilling. The majority of the NQ2 core runs, that were made from the base of Adelaidean cover to end-of-hole, were engineered as orientated drill core, so as to provide useful structural and geotechnical data. Minor IOCG type sulphide mineralisation was encountered in all of the holes, with chalcopyrite occurring sporadically throughout the basement metasedimentary sequence over quite wide intervals carrying between 0.5% and up to 4% Cu; bornite also occurs sometimes in lenses up to 10 m wide. Pyrite is more common, forming between trace to 10% of the rock mass which comprises mostly pervasively hydrothermally altered, variably actinolite / haematite / sericite / chlorite / carbonate rich interbedded sandstones and siltstones/argillites. Magnetite alteration is minor, and is restricted to thin veins or weak disseminations. Many siliceous veins, 1 m to 10 m thick, are present at depth. In all of the rocks, it appears that an initial higher-temperature alteration assemblage has suffered retrogressive overprinting by a later lower-temperature assemblage. Hole TD5 indicated that Body 27 is likely to be a fault-bounded block or pipe of intermediate volcanic rock which is surrounded by volcaniclastic sediments and fault brecciated low grade metasedimentary rocks. A major fault was cut in hole TD6 from 640 m to 813 m hole depth; deeper down, a strongly foliated shear zone lies between 1077 m and 1090 m hole depth. All of the holes' drill core basement sections, and part of the cover sequence in TD4, were sampled at 1-metre intervals for later analysis. A total of 2170 half-core samples were laboratory assayed for a suite of 29 trace elements. 20 selected core samples from the hole depth interval 423 m to 774 m in hole TD4 were submitted to Doug Mason for petrological and mineralogical descriptions. All of the cores were photographed and were logged at 1-metre intervals for their major petrophysical properties and U/Th/K plus total count radioactivity, and for the presence of mesoscopic rock defects. During licence Year 10, the majority of the work undertaken by Straits involved Native Title land access negotiations and meetings. Since 25/2/2008, Straits had become severely hampered in its efforts to regain access to the Torrens prospect due to overriding Native Title and aboriginal heritage protection issues related to creation of an amended site card (Number 6437-7237) for the Lake Torrens recorded site, that now included Andamooka Island and the linking causeway, in addition to all of Lake Torrens. All endeavours were being pursued vigorously by the company, with the assistance of PIRSA as appropriate, to ensure that the proposed further deep exploratory drilling of untested priority targets, for which $100,000 in subsidy funds had been granted under the PACE Initiative Year 5 programme, could soon commence. In the interim, the GeoDiscovery Group of consultants performed 3D inversion modelling of local gravity and magnetic datasets, the results of which suggested that holes TD4 and TD5 may only have skimmed the northern edge of a shallow apophysis of the larger high-density source of the Torrens prospect gravity anomaly. During May 2008, a structural analysis was made of the drill cores from holes TD4, TD5 and TD6 by consultant Jon Standing of Jigsaw Geoscience. The intent was to gain a preliminary understanding of the structural setting of the buried basement rocks, as well as to audit the current structural database and appraise the relevance of data collection protocols active on site. Between March and May 2008, Doug Mason described the petrology of 17 basement core samples from holes selected intervals in TD5 and TD6. He found that fracturing, veining and pervasive alteration of IOCG type had affected all 16 samples in hole TD5. Both potassic-type and calc-silicate/skarn-type alteration were observed in varied intervals down the hole. The skarn-type alteration assemblages are characterised by the presence of either grossular - andradite garnet or diopsidic clinopyroxene, or both. The lone sample taken from a depth of 848.3 m in TD6 represents an arkosic sandstone which had suffered moderately strong alteration by chlorite + haematite + trace leucoxene/rutile. This alteration was considered to represent distal low-temperature alteration of the IOCG type. In addition to the petrology completed by Mason Geoscience, a uranium mineral characterisation study was undertaken to determine the source of radioactive particles reported from a drill core sample from TD5 (hole depth interval 644.7 to 644.85 m) which assayed 200 ppm U. Autoradiography had initially determined the presence of such radioactive particles. Subsequent to this, a QEMSCAN analysis conducted by Amdel determined that the: “ bulk mineralogy spectrum produced by the x-ray analysis confirmed the occurrence of uranium phases within the sample containing the elements U and Y. This composition is indicative of kamotoite-(Y): formula Y2(UO2)4[O4(CO3)3].14H2O, existing as mineral grains of average grainsize 30 microns.”