A global miner hoping to revive the Kimberley diamond industry believes it may have discovered Australia’s next big diamond field. Lucapa Diamond Company has recovered more than 1,100 diamonds from a single drill hole at their Brooking project 1,800km north of Perth.
The project sits only 50 kilometres east of the mothballed Ellendale mine that once produced 50 per cent of the world’s yellow diamonds and supplied stones to New York’s famous Tiffany and Co. It is the second significant discovery made by Lucapa since they began drilling for lamproite at Little Spring Creek last year.
Chairman Miles Kennedy has a long history of searching for diamonds, having set up the Ellendale mine almost 25 years ago. He said after almost three decades in the diamond industry, the discovery of that many diamonds in a single drill hole was “unprecedented”.
“It is three times as good as the first sensational find, so these two results together basically confirm that we certainly have one diamondiferous lamproite,” he said.
New technology a ‘game-changer’
The Ellendale Diamond province has seen many diamond mining ventures, including the embattled miner Kimberley Diamond Company whose project went into administration in 2015.
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