Blue Moon Gold Mine, Tennant Creek, Barkly Region, Northern Territory, Australia

Latitude & Longitude (WGS84):	19° 40' 17'' South , 134° 23' 36'' East
Latitude & Longitude (decimal):	-19.67145,134.39358
Köppen climate type:	BWh : Hot deserts climate

The Blue Moon gold mine was pegged initially in 1935, by Phillip Ward, his wife Mary Ward, and Mary's brother Stuart McIntyre. Phillip was a stockman from Queensland, and Wyndham Western Australia, before turning his attention to prospecting around the Tennant Creek area. They mined the deposit until 1942, achieving gold worth 140 000 pounds, enough to buy the Banka Banka pastoral station in the region. At various times into the 1950's, several companies took options over the mine with little success.

Patrick Frances Young and Charles Owen Thomas in 1953, successfully applied for forfeiture of the mine, the warden finding little recent work was being conducted on the lease by the Wards. By this point the mine had produced 3600 tonnes of ore for 12 360 ounces of gold.

During the 1960's and 1970's, the mine was operational sporadically. In 1971, its noted as one of only two operating gold mines in the Tennant Creek area. Around 1956 the mine was purchased by George Graves for 25 000 pounds, who then erected machinery and built a dam (Blue Moon 411E, 14 acres, Blue Moon North, East, North Extended and West all 7 acres each). W.G. MacLean acquired the lease in 1965, conducting some mining, and is still mentioned as owning the mine in 1976. Three shafts are mentioned at this time to 135, 106 and 57 feet depth.

From the early 1950's, to mid 1970's, at least twelve geology studies were conducted relating to the mine and surrounding area. Really there was one rich shoot, mined by the Wards, then little else.

From the top down is hematite shale; cherty shale; sedimentary breccia fragments in fine grained greywacke with interbedded red siltstone; brown purple fawn coloured mudstone with narrow bands of white clay, and narrow bands of dark red chert, with minor hematite and fine grey ash; brown siltstone and lithic greywacke with mudstone, many quartz veins with hematite margins; hematite shale, green tuffaceous greywacke/mudstone.

Gold is found in ironstone lodes. Four of these are found at Blue Moon, but only Lode No. 1 has produced significant gold. This consists of micaeous and specular hematite with quartz, black dense siliceous hematite, limonitic jasper. The ore shoot is found at the crushed and shattered core of the ironstone body. The shoot has been mined out.

The Blue Moon gold mine is 26 kilometres east of Tennant Creek, in an area of isolated steep sided ironstone or jasper hills, forming part of the Quartz Hill/Rocky Range shear zone. The mine is reached by taking a track eastwards from the Tennant Creek repeater station. This passes several other old mines along the way. A 4 wheel drive is essential. The mine appears to be on the north side of an isolated hill, little more now than a cleared area, with possibly some shafts.

Mineral List

5 valid minerals.

Rock Types Recorded

Regional Geology

This geological map and associated information on rock units at or nearby to the coordinates given for this locality is based on relatively small scale geological maps provided by various national Geological Surveys. This does not necessarily represent the complete geology at this locality but it gives a background for the region in which it is found.

Click on geological units on the map for more information. Click here to view full-screen map on Macrostrat.org

Cenozoic 0 - 66 Ma ID: 720975

sand plain 38499 Age: Cenozoic (0 - 66 Ma) Description: Sand or gravel plains; may include some residual alluvium; quartz sand sheets commonly with ferruginous pisoliths or pebbles; local clay, calcrete, laterite, silcrete, silt, colluvium Comments: regolith; synthesis of multiple published descriptions Lithology: Regolith Reference: Raymond, O.L., Liu, S., Gallagher, R., Zhang, W., Highet, L.M. Surface Geology of Australia 1:1 million scale dataset 2012 edition. Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia). [5]

Data and map coding provided by Macrostrat.org, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License

References