Good morning everybody, and welcome to the Westgold Resources Limited September Quarterly Overview. Your speakers today are Wayne Bramwell, Managing Director, Tommy Heng, Chief Financial Officer, Phillip Wilding, Chief Operating Officer, and Matthew Pilbeam, General Manager, EH&S. I'll now hand over to Wayne to commence the call.
Thank you, Shane, and welcome to everyone joining us today. I'm here joined today by our CFO, Tommy Heng, Chief Operating Officer, Phil Wilding, and General Manager of EH&S, Matt Pilbeam, to talk through our Q1 performance. We'll jump straight to slide three. Slide three summarizes our performance against our FY23 guidance. We're very pleased to say this is the fifth quarter in a row we've met guidance and we are tracking to our FY23 targets. We're starting to show increasing consistency in our financial performance and the objective for FY23 is to maintain this. Jumping on to slide four. Won't talk to these bullet points other to say that Q1 FY23 was a reset month, both on a corporate and operational front. The inflationary cost environment in WA required a full review of our operating strategy.
We were definitive and made changes in late August to address our cost trajectory, and by early in September we were starting to see that trajectory change. There's a lot of work to do here to optimize our operations, but Q1 shows we are on the right path to deliver our FY23 strategy. I now hand back to Matt Pilbeam to talk to slide five.
Yeah. Thanks, Wayne, and good morning everyone. We're pleased to outline improving results in our Environmental Health and Safety Performance for the quarter. All metrics are currently trending in the right direction in line with our FY23 EH&S strategy. Highlights for Q1 include a Lost Time Injury-free quarter, which is a great milestone for our business going forward. Subsequently, we saw a 39% decrease in our Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate to 0.86, so under the 1.0 mark, which is very pleasing. In addition, we had a 19.5% decrease in our Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate for the quarter down to 18.44.
A 10% reduction in High Potential Incident Frequency Rate to 7.29, and we maintained zero significant environmental incidents for the quarter as well, which remained the frequency rate at zero. In summary, we are acutely aware that our numbers in the EH&S performance area are still high in comparison with industry, but we're comfortable that we are certainly heading in the right direction going forward. Thanks, Wayne, back to you.
Thanks, Matt. Slide number six. These two images really speak to the simplification of the business that we've worked upon in the last quarter. With our Bryah operations now, basically it's a single mine, single mill. When you look at the Murchison operations, you can see there are three large mines operating. In total, we've shifted the business from six operating undergrounds last quarter to four large operating undergrounds this quarter. This simplification of the business also helps us reset the cost base. I'll hand over now to slide seven for Tommy Heng to speak to.
Good morning everyone. Thank you, Wayne. The quarter in review. We are on track from a production perspective and a cost perspective to our guidance. It adequately shows what we are heading towards from a guidance perspective. The graph on the right showing the quarter-on-quarter gold production and All-in Sustaining Costs. As Wayne commented, we are hitting our production targets quarter-on-quarter now. The cost pressure is no surprise to all, demonstrates the inflationary pressures mainly along the diesel and consumables for us. Slide eight. Slide eight demonstrates again in detail what has happened in the quarter. Basically, it boils down to the continued inflationary pressures. Back in Q4, we reported fuel prices, for example, increased by 42%. This quarter, that has continued to increase a further 13%.
Albeit with consumables and fuel prices, it seems to have calmed down, which we are hoping will continue in the coming quarter. I'm pleased to report with the exploration we are ramping that up with our drilling programs. I will now hand over to Phillip Wilding, our Chief Operating Officer, for slide nine.
Thanks, Tommy. Continuing on these key metrics. As we've mentioned, we've started this reset plan in the business, which has happened post a critical review of all the operations within the group. As a result of that, South Emu-Triton mine, we expedited the cessation of mining there and put it to care and maintenance. Comet, that mine's also gone to care and maintenance late in the quarter, mainly because Big Bell is now producing sufficient material to keep the mills full. It's not required at this point in time. Fender, although we didn't start it, we have put that on pause and it's set up for a fast restart if and when the conditions are right and we need it.
It's important to note with all three of these mines, they're on Care and Maintenance and they're all ready to be started quickly when the conditions are right and the mine plan suits what the business requires. As part of doing all these as well, we've been able to redeploy all our personnel into our bigger assets. The mines are full and we have a good workforce there. The open pit underground fleet, we've rationalized, moved it around and optimized what we do there, as well as reviewing our supplier agreements. The key chart is on the right there, showing the month-over-month changes in the business. In August, we hit the button and we started to make the changes. Going to September, we saw a large drop in our All-in Sustaining Costs, and this is gonna become more apparent in Q2 and going forwards. Over to slide 10.
Up at the Bryah operations, we had stellar performance at our Starlight underground mine yet again with excellent production coming out of it and costs remaining steady even in this current environment. Processing performed well. Did have a few impacts due to wet weather impacting the tonnages, but ounces remained strong. There's now three drill rigs running in this mine, helping to plan a long life and allow optimization of the current asset and some very impressive results coming out of the Nightfall lodes. Along with working on the future pit programs, which we're slowly progressing through when needed. Over to slide 11. Up at the Murchison. Our processing plant's performed well with a small increase in throughput and relatively steady grade, small, slightly down.
The ounces mainly impacted by changing and putting the high-grade pit feeds in a couple of the previously run mines in, transitioning across the open pit stockpiles where we're now monetizing those. Big Bell and Bluebird mines are continuing to grow, and these are going to continue to grow in the coming quarters as well, both of them having record production. The underground expansion at Bluebird's well and truly underway. The decline going down, and we're also looking around north and south with drill rigs hitting the southern areas in particular. Open pit mining is all finished off, and the final work's completed during Q1. Now back to Tommy Heng for slide 12.
Thank you, Phil. Slide 12. In quarter one, we delivered 66,000 oz, resulting in AUD 160 million and an achieved gold price of AUD 2,411. Our operating costs, as I mentioned earlier on, continue to be impacted by the cost pressures along with fuel prices and consumables. Capital expenditure, we're expecting to stabilize as we optimize our bigger mines and the operational changes that Phil has just mentioned with the reset. We are investing in our exploration, as mentioned earlier as well. We remain debt-free with a closing cash and cash equivalent of AUD 159 million. We have begun to deploy our growth funds on the items, as mentioned in the slide here, around our drilling program and our TSF facility at Fortnum. Slide 13.
Our hedge book currently sits at 109,000 oz at an average price of AUD 2,419. This hedge position is reviewed on a monthly basis. I will now hand over back to Phillip Wilding for slide 14.
Investing in our drill bit. We now have eight rigs running on our reserve definition and extension drilling in our four key underground assets. Big Bell, it's got one rig there at most times, and that's just keeping in front of the development. Bluebird Mine, there's one rig there permanently, but the Big Bell rig there goes up as required and sites are available. Starlight, three rigs spinning up there as previously mentioned. This system has so much potential, and that's what we're trying to unlock. Paddy's Flat, that site now has three rigs going there, and as per yesterday's ASX release on the Contessa Bonanza drill results, it's shown to be a spectacular ore system with a lot of potential. Back to Wayne for slide 15.
Thanks, Phil. I'll speak to the exploration part. It's fantastic that we've got two rigs running now on the surface. We've recently announced the commencement of drilling at Great Fingall Deeps, and we are into the first hole as we speak. Again, the size of the prize at Fingall Deeps is large. Again, I'm really excited now that we are starting to reinvest in the drill bit with 10 rigs running across our operations focused on resource development, extension, and discovery. The last slide. Predictable and consistent is what the objective is for this year. The reset of the business is very much focused on simplifying the business, and that will speak to us becoming more predictable and consistent. The turnaround in the business is just started.
Q1 hasn't had the full benefits of a reset, and we expect to see more of those benefits in Q2. Inflationary impacts we've spoken to have been the reason we've had to rethink what we do here and take definitive action. Those actions in April and August has seen our cost trajectory change. In Q2 and going forward, we're really focused on operational efficiencies. Speaking to that's about how we consume and what we consume. Diesel is a major input to our business and many of the things we're doing now speaks to reduction of our consumption. We're reviewing all our major supply contracts, and we were very happy to announce the award of a group haulage contract to MLG Oz this quarter. This very much speaks to operational efficiencies.
The third part of the reset is really around our business improvement program. This is targeting productivity gains, across every part of the business to try and drive higher profitability. I'm really impressed and excited that we are back drilling. Eight rigs in our four large mines, two on the surface. You create your own luck with the drill bit, and Westgold's very much doing that as we speak. In terms of investing in the future, during this quarter, we'll announce the commencement of construction of our first gas-fired power station at Tuckabianna, and that will be the first of four, which will replace six diesel stations across the group. There's a special delivery coming to our Starlight Mine during this quarter, and we will be making a lot of noise about a new Cat R2900 XE diesel electric loader.
Stand by for that. In closing the presentation and opening it up to questions, I'd like to acknowledge our workforce. Their agility and ability to react to the changes we've made in Q1 has been fantastic. I'm so proud of the team and their commitment to making this business safer, sustainable, and profitable. Thanks again. I'll close the presentation now, Shane, and open it up to questions from the listeners.
Thanks, everybody. If you have a question, please enter it into the question facility in the program. We'll just pause now for a second to allow anybody to put in a question. Once again, people, if you have a question, feel free to enter it into the question box.
It's a busy day in the market today, Shane. If anyone wants more information about this presentation, please hit the investor relations email or pick up the phone. Thanks for your time.
Thank you everyone for your attendance, and that finalizes today's webinar.