Victory-Defiance Gold Mine (Victory mine; Defiance mine; N31; Conqueror Lode), St. Ives gold camp, Kambalda, Coolgardie Shire, Western Australia, Australiai

Regional Level Types
Victory-Defiance Gold Mine (Victory mine; Defiance mine; N31; Conqueror Lode)	Mine
St. Ives gold camp	- not defined -
Kambalda	Town
Coolgardie Shire	Shire
Western Australia	State
Australia	Country

An underground gold mine, formed by merging the Victory underground mine and Defiance open pit. Owned initially by Western Mining Corporation, mining was conducted here as an open pit and underground, starting in 1982. Goldfields Ltd took over the St Ives mines in 2001. It is part of a complex of mines near the southern shore of Lake Lefroy and just east of the Lefroy Mill.

In the Defiance open pit, gold is found in low angle shear zone splays which branch from the footwall of the 32 Shear Zone, and Repulse Fault. Gold is hosted in several rocks types. This includes the Paringa Basalt; quartz rich Defiance Dolerite zones of brecciated quartz-carbonate-albite matrices; amphibole-chlorite rich zones with mineralisation associated with quartz-feldspar porphyry intrusions crosscutting the tensional stockwork vein arrays; isolated high grade gold in diopside-almandine contacts with the dolerite dykes.

In the Victory area, there is an open recumbent north-south axis fold, with the western limb upward facing with a shallow west dip, and eastern limb being upright and overturned. This is cut by a series of north north-west felsic to intermediate intrusions, further disrupted by north north-west fault systems, the most major ones called Victory, Repulse, and Paringa Faults.

Gold in the area is controlled by the late D3 Defiance Shear Zone, with gold found in north-west splays from the Lefroy Fault Shear Zone. Gold at Victory includes being found in quartz vein stockworks, or the same hosted in shear zones, or a composite of the two. The quartz vein stockworks is generally found in steep dipping Kapai slate and porphyry intrusions. The stockworks are 2cm to 6 cm wide at 5cm to 30 cm intervals. Gold is associated with pyritic alteration envelopes around the veins.

Mineralisation in the shear zones is restricted to a narrower (5-10m) lode, of a breccia stockwork vein array, with a pyritic alteration envelope. '32' is the largest ore body at Victory/Defiance. In the eastern part of the mine it is north striking and east dipping, while the western part it is east-west striking and south dipping. In the adjacent Defiance pit the shear zone forms a series of stacked sub parallel sub-horizontal shear zones.

The Victory-Defiance complex also hosts the N31 Pit, and the Victory underground mine accesses the Conquerer and East Repulse lodes, often in the literature called separate mines. They have been loaded as such on Mindat, largely due to the amount of information found.

The N31 open pit is within the Victory-Defiance complex. In particular here, high grade gold is controlled by the interaction of 2 south plunging, shallow dipping, shear zone (upper N30 and lower N31), with sub-vertical felsic porphyry intrusives. Mineralisation is found in the Footwall of the regional extensive Repulse Shear Zone. Other host rocks are Devon Consols Basalt, Kapai Slate and Defiance Dolerite. This is overlain by patchy localised supergene zones.

The Conquerer Lode, sometimes referred to as the Conquerer Mine, is accessed through the underground Victory Mine. Some sources also state it is part of the Leviathan resource. All are close to one another. The mineralised zone is several stacked lenses similar to the Defiance Pit. These dip south-west by 20 degrees, lodes up to 100 metres wide, striking east-west, of variable thickness. The gold is controlled by the intersection of a low angle shear zone with south-west striking Defiance Dolerite. The shear flattens in the dolerite creating localised dilational horizons. Economic amounts of gold occurs within an alteration envelope from 10 metres thick in the Paringa Basalt and Devon Consols Basalt to 100 metres thick in the Defiance Dolerite. Species found within the lode area are albite, ankerite, biotite, chlorite, dolomite, magnetite, pyrite, pyrrhotite, probably quartz, and of course gold.

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References