1. Melbourne Geology of GOLD
5 day course on the geology of gold
This is to certify that Rob Chatterjee attended the Geology of GOLD course at the University of
Melbourne from 26-30 March 2007. He sat the final exam and was graded ‘First class Honour level’.
This course consisted of a two-day field trip to the central Victorian goldfields including Bendigo, and
three days of lectures. The lecture component consisted of:
- Why gold is a special metal: history, supply and demand
- Chemical and physical properties of gold
- Goldfields from around the world: gold-only and gold-plus deposits
- Forming a major goldfield: enrichment, segregation from base metals, timing
- Magmatic processes and gold
- Hydrothermal processes and gold
- Structural controls on goldfields
- Alteration around goldfields
- Fluid access and fluid-wallrock interaction
- Genesis of gold-only deposits
- Exploration design: footprint size and shape, depth extent, descriptive and genetic models.
- Geology of Victoria and its goldfields
- Geomorphology and placer gold formation
- Weathering and gold
- Archaean greenstone gold, dolerites as host rocks, Kalgoorlie
- Goldfields at high metamorphic grade, i.e. Big Bell / Hemlo types
- Carlin gold province; porphyry-hosted gold; Witwatersrand gold
- Epithermal gold deposits in volcanic environments
- Iron oxide copper gold uranium deposits
- Exploration for gold including geophysical and geochemical methods
- Lateral thinking, problem solving, approximating – all as relevant to the mineral industry.
Course lecturers: Jonathan Law, Martin Hughes, Roger Powell, Neil Phillips.
Mine visits: Victoria Hill (field mapping exercise at a historic mine site in Bendigo), Central Deborah
(underground tour in Bendigo goldfield), Fosterville (Biox processing plant, open pit and drill core).
Practical exercises: Rock type recognition including common igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic
rocks, gold-related alteration at low and high metamorphic grade, representative samples from most
major gold deposit types globally, samples from non-gold major ore deposits, sulphide minerals
associated with gold deposits, using mineral chemistry as a tool to link assemblages to bulk rock
composition, structural reading in the underground environment, and interpretation of a set of rock
samples from a central Victoria goldfield.
Professor Neil Phillips
Course leader, March 2007