One off the Wood with Ian Murray – Gold Road Resources

While on tour at Diggers & Dealers, The Roadhouse was the guest of Gold Road Resources to visit its Yamarna Belt project, located 140 kilometres east of Laverton on the eastern edge of the Yilgarn Craton in Western Australia.

The company’s executive chairman Ian Murray called into The Roadhouse on his way home for a quick chat and to have One Off The Wood.

It’s hard to miss your South African accent Ian, how long have you lived in Australia?

I moved to Sydney with DRD Gold in 2005 and was there for six months until I left them and moved to Perth.

Was the move to Perth because it is where a lot of mining action is?

No. I was born in South Africa, on the coast, so I grew up surfing and windsurfing. I moved up to Johannesburg and got involved in the gold mining sector. I was flying back and forward to Perth and I realised that it was a place where I could work in the gold mining sector and live a coastal life style. So it was a no-brainer to move here.

So how did the move into Gold Road eventuate?

Again, that was by accident. In late 2007 they asked me to join as a non-executive director. Then in January 2008, then-chairman Richard Harris resigned. I was asked whether I would consider stepping up to run the company and I’ve been in the position ever since.

That was in the middle of the GFC, which was a difficult time to raise money. In 2009 we were able to raise enough money for Ziggy Lubieniecki to drill Central Bore and that’s when he had the first big hits.

We did another raising after that to further fund the Central Bore drilling and then we came out with the maiden resource earlier this year.

It has been a pretty rapid ride so far for Gold Road to get to where it is now.

As an exploration company unless you’re active, you’re not going to find anything. If you’re not putting holes in the ground you may as well shut up shop.

Our view is to keep corporate costs low, so we have a small corporate office, and whatever money we raise goes into the field and that has proven to be successful so far.

With the amount of drill holes you have put down in that time, the number with which you haven’t hit anything you could pretty much count on one hand.

Central Bore is a stand-out deposit, with virtually a 100 per cent strike rate with hitting mineralised structure.

I hope Ziggy has the same success rate on all of our targets. We will no doubt have plenty of hits but we will also have some misses.

Ziggy practically lives and breathes this project.

He is very passionate about what’s out there and about its potential.

He sets a great example for the young team we currently have. We are in the process of recruiting senior field geologists and an exploration manager, but for now Ziggy is spending a lot of time mentoring the guys and showing them what to do.

So how do you intend progressing things from here?

We will carry on drilling out Central Bore and Justinian. From an economic perspective they will be treated as one project. We need to see how big they are. As soon as the rate of increase of the resource slows down, that’s when we will look at entering the development phase.

In parallel with the drilling we are carrying out a scoping study. What we want to end up being is a self-funded explorer. We want to take the advanced projects, get them into development, and get them into production generating cash flow to fund exploration of the rest of the belt.

Has winning the Emerging Company Award at this year’s Diggers & Dealers conference raised your profile?

We had a very good Diggers & Dealers conference. A lot of larger brokers, who wouldn’t normally follow an exploration story, approached our booth wanting to know more information about us and the project.

A major benefit of winning that award was that about half the people attending the gala dinner hadn’t heard of us before then.

Does the new industry recognition place Gold Road as a potential takeover target?

I think, given the strategic position we have, controlling the majority of the Yamarna Belt; at some stage we will be on the radar of the larger companies wanting to obtain more resource ounces to replace what they are mining.

My vision is that I want to keep running this company, develop it to become a producer and have a whole pipeline of exploration, development and production.

So with all the recent success and notoriety of the company do you get time to get down the beach to surf these days?

It’s winter. I do have a yacht moored at the Fremantle Sailing Club and during the school holidays I take my family out and we enjoy life.

Last April we sailed up around Malaysia, but it’s not as nice as Rottnest Island.

It sounds as though Perth has been very kind to Ian Murray.

It’s a good place. It’s a big city, but it’s not a big city, which is something only people who live here truly understand.