In the meantime – and as part of the JV agreement with BML – Auric has received a further $2 million in cash surplus from the latest campaign and a $1 million cash repayment for a loan towards the mining costs. However, there is still also a considerable amount of additional surplus cash sitting in the JV accounts which will be added to after the final campaign.

If an historic cost of production of $1993 per ounce in 2023 at Jeffreys Find, including haulage and milling costs, was applied to the 2024 campaign, it is not hard to extrapolate a potential profit of $15 million per partner from the estimated production of 20,000 ounces by generating a sales price in excess of AU$3700 per ounce. Once finalised, the surplus would then be distributed post-costs and tax, as a special dividend to both parties.

Punters may remember the gold market as far back as 2000. It was then, at the height of the “dotcom” boom when everything was supposedly going “virtual” and the wonder days of gold were written in history, that the United Kingdom’s then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, famously announced that the nation would be selling its entire gold reserve at US$250 (AU$365) per ounce.

That moment turned out to be the bottom of a multi-year bear cycle for the gold price and a seminal point in time for Brown, who has not been allowed to forget the disastrous decision. So, to see gold at more than 10-times higher than its 25-year low prices would surely now be warming the cockles of the most ardent goldbugs’ hearts.

Auric is a remarkable story of good timing. Few other junior explorers with limited cash and virtually no infrastructure have been able to capture and profit from the bonanza gold price as well as it has.

And savvy market investors would be grinning like the Cheshire Cat. A year ago, the company’s share price sat at less than 4c and it recently hit a 12-month high of 39c – marking a jump in the realm of some 900 per cent in its journey from nanocap entity to microcap.

And with Jeffreys Find getting closer to finishing, Auric will now be hoping that it can do an equally profitable “rinse-and-repeat” exercise at its much bigger Munda mine near Widgiemooltha next year.

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