Welcome back everyone to the afternoon session on day three here at Diggers and Dealers. To commence proceedings for the afternoon session, our first speaker is Wayne Bramwell, Managing Director and CEO of Westgold Resources. Wayne has over 30 years of experience across the full mining value chain. Wayne was appointed MD of Westgold in February 2020, with the company now operating seven underground mines, four processing plants, and employing over 2,000 people across Western Australia. Wayne is a metallurgist and mineral economist by background and brings practical end-to-end perspective to building and operating gold businesses. Wayne also serves as chair of the Gold Industry Group. Thank you, Wayne.
Thank you, Duncan, and good afternoon, Diggers and Dealers, and to everyone who's joining us remotely today. Westgold's presentation today only has one objective, and that's to really explain how our business strategy is delivering value for our shareholders. Before I dive into that, who is Westgold? Westgold is a growth story. We are an ASX 100 mid-cap gold producer, unhedged, well-funded, and pursuing a strategy of growth from a portfolio of organic assets. This has been a really good year for us in FY 2026. I'll talk to that as I go forward. Long story short, Westgold is well-funded and on a growth trajectory. Before we dive into how the strategy's delivering value, I'd really like to talk to FY 2026 scorecard. In FY 2026, we beat our production guidance. More importantly, we delivered that production of 387,000 ounces inside our cost guidance at AUD 2,841 an ounce.
Those two factors put together saw our treasury grow from AUD 575 million to AUD 939 million in cash, bullion, and liquid investments. Is our strategy delivering value? Let me talk more. The business, we are only mining in the great state of Western Australia. We operate four processing hubs through the business, and this is how we think about the business more so than the collection of open pit and underground mines that we operate. In the Murchison, three processing hubs. In the Southern Goldfields, one. These processing hubs give us strategic power in the Murchison. What's happening within the business now, we've now got mine assets, which are now starting to be very productive and put stockpiles in front of every one of these hubs. The trend is your friend. In the next three slides, I just want to try and outline, say, three key value metrics.
Everyone has a different determination for value. For the sake of today's presentation, let's go with these three. If production is your value metric, this was a big year for Westgold. The business is 10 years old. I'm only showing production for the last five years. In the two business units we have, the Murchison and the Southern Goldfields, they are quite different. We've owned the Murchison for 10 years. We've only owned the Southern Goldfields for two. We had to slow the Murchison down some years back to make it go faster, and you can see the growth in production from the Murchison business as we sit here today. As I said, the Southern Goldfields business, literally, I think today is the second-year anniversary of the acquisition of those assets, which include the large Beta Hunt underground and the Higginsville processing plant.
If cash is king, if your value metric is treasury strength, this goes back to FY 2021 and shows how we ended up at AUD 939 million in cash, bullion, and liquid investments. That's only half the story. Growth is not free. We've invested AUD 1.2 billion over this journey, I'm really proud about what the business and what the team has done. That commitment to capital has revolutionized the business, I'm happy to say that's largely been in mine infrastructure and drilling. This is a very resilient business now, it's quite different. If your value metric is shareholder returns, again, the trend here is your friend.
We were a different business some years ago, again, one of the key changes in the last four has been to really focus on how we structure this business to be sustainable and to be able to return capital consistently to our shareholders. The next phase. I'm smashing through this, to explain the next phase of our journey, it's really quite simple. Bigger mines need bigger mills. Today, Westgold announced a small upgrade to our Cue business. Why? Stockpile growth around our Cue hub is growing really fast. How do you monetize those stockpiles? Expand your processing plant, lower your operating cost, and increase your production. We're taking the Cue hub from 1.3 and 1.4 to 1.7 million tons per annum. It's a modest amount of capital that'll be installed during FY 2027, with that throughput available to us in FY 2028.
Back to still within the Murchison, back to the thematic about bigger mines need bigger mills. What we've got in Meekatharra now is the Bluebird- South Junction mine. We're showing this asset over a 10-year basis, only through intense drilling for the last four have we seen the resource and the reserve grow at Bluebird- South Junction. This slide only talks to FY 2025, but I think we've had six drill rigs on the surface and underground on this asset, which sits 600 meters from our larger processing plant, for over a year. We'll provide new update numbers on Bluebird- South Junction soon, but most pleasingly, it hit a 1 million-ton per annum exit rate in June this year. Our biggest mine, as I said, it's quite a good juxtaposition. We've owned the Murchison for 10 years, the Southern Goldfields for two.
Hence, we're only showing a two-year picture on what the investment at Beta Hunt has done. Within 12 months of owning Beta Hunt, we added 2.3 million ounces of resource. We're very close now to putting out a maiden reserve, on this one asset, we've had between six and eight rigs underground for 12 months. You haven't seen the impact of those rigs yet. Delivering value, this is a slide that I think anyone who's an investor should be very interested in. For most people, value is about what can we do for the investment community? The best thing we can do as operators in this business is find ways to enhance shareholder returns, really, we've got two mechanisms, share buybacks and dividends.
I'm really happy to say that in the last, or FY 2026 was the first year that Westgold entered into or started a share buyback, and this is something which we'll continue to do. It is a legitimate means of capital returns and, dovetailed with dividends, will show our returns to our shareholders in FY 2026 and onwards growing. In closing, strategy to value. To me, I love this business. The people in it have had a red-hot go during FY 2026. Let's be clear, no one within this business is high-fiving themselves. We are very quietly confident about the ability to continue to grow our outputs, lower our costs, and increase our returns to shareholders. If any of these value metrics are of interest to you, check out Westgold. Thanks.
Thanks, Wayne. Short and sharp and to the point. Thank you. Our next speaker is Mr. Glenn Jardine, Managing Director of Bellavista Resources. Glenn has extensive experience in the resources industry, spanning early-stage exploration through to managing multi-operational corporations. Most recently, Glenn was Managing Director of De Grey Mining, successfully taking the world-class Hemi Gold Project from discovery through to financing, prior to the company being taken over by Northern Star Resources for over AUD 6 billion. Please welcome Glenn to the stage. Thanks, Glenn.
Thanks very much, Duncan. It's a real pleasure to be back here at Diggers and Dealers and also very excited to be able to present Bellavista Resources to the forum for the first time. Thanks very much to the organizers. Bellavista Resources is a micro-cap in the resources space. We've got two assets at the moment. One's a gold asset in Canada. The other one's a base metals asset in the Pilbara of Western Australia. I'll get into a bit more detail on those two assets later. We've got rigs operating or having finished drilling on both those sites. We've got two rigs operating on the asset in Ontario, Canada, at Pickle Crow. We finished drilling for some bulk samples at the Brumby Project in the Pilbara.
Assays are pending on both of those assets, and we're well-funded with AUD 30 million in the bank at the end of June, and good news flow to come. Just take note of the disclaimers. Okay. Bellavista Resources represents what I think is a really excellent entry point for investors. We've got two really good projects, tier 1 potential in tier 1 jurisdictions. The first one is Pickle Crow in Ontario, which we acquired off FireFly back in February, and that deal was completed in April. We got on the ground and started drilling there at the end of June. What we're doing there is an initial 15,000-meter diamond drilling program into near-surface mineralization, and we're looking at the potential for open-pit resources in that space.
That project comes with a resource of 2.8 million ounces at 7.2 grams per ton and historically was mined at a half an ounce a ton for 1.5 million ounces between 1935 and 1966. A really good gold endowment, really good history, and what we're looking at doing is seeing if we can kickstart that project again. We've also got a very early-stage exploration project at Sioux Lookout in Ontario, where we've been doing surface sampling, and that's following up some previous surface sampling from FireFly, which picked up just under 75 grams a ton and 15 grams a ton back in 2022. The project in the Pilbara is called Brumby. It's a hyper-enriched black shale. It's multi-commodity. I'll get into that in a minute.
We've just finished a 4,000-meter RC drilling program to collect a bulk sample to undertake heap leach test work and to also look at the mineralization continuity. The purpose of that last aspect is to see what sort of drill spacing we might need to come up with a maiden mineral resource towards the end of this year. Okay, capital structure. It's a nice capital structure, 200 million shares on issue. Really nicely, tightly held by people who kicked off Bellavista in the first place and also institutions who are in Bellavista or who've come across from the in specie distribution of Bellavista shares into FireFly shareholdings. A good institutional register and nicely, tightly held. That net asset value of AUD 50 million at the moment, we think represents very good value right now.
Really, I think the market's just waiting to see the results of the drilling that we've been conducting at Brumby and also that's ongoing at Pickle Crow. All right, onto the Ontario assets. They're in the Superior Craton. For those of you who are aware, the geology there is exactly the same as it is here in the Yilgarn and Pilbara Cratons. Same rocks, same genesis, same time of gold mineralization. It's a really good place for Australians to go and explore. We're in a thing called the Uchi Subprovince. Pickle Crow is there in the eastern part of that subprovince. It's a really well-endowed area for gold mineralization and gold deposits. You can see Red Lake out to the west, Dixie Lake, which is now Kinross, previously Great Bear. Some very big deposits.
Really, in terms of gold endowment and grade, Pickle Crow's the next one on the rank there in terms of scale. We're very excited about the address we've got. Sioux Lookout's in another province just to the south, and it's immediately along strike from NexGold's Goliath Project, which has got just under 3 million ounces sitting there. Okay. We're really blessed with infrastructure up at Pickle Crow, which is very handy for the exploration we're doing now, and also for any future project development. We've got sealed highway all the way up there. There's a really good airstrip. We've got two major substations sitting there with power lines running through the lease. We've already got a 50-person camp to do the exploration from and excellent communication. Very happy with what we've got there. Okay, just getting into what we're doing, what the focus is.
This is a long projection of the wireframes from that 2.8-million-ounce mineral resource. We are focusing in the top 260 meters, where there's 1 million ounces at 4 grams on an unconstrained basis above half a gram per ton. That's a pretty nice place to start. What we're doing is we're drilling into that top 260 meters to see if we can identify open pitable resources over the next 6 to 12 months. Sitting underneath that is just under 2 million ounces at 8 grams per ton. If we can get a start out there with open pit mineralization, sitting immediately beneath those pits is a pretty nice existing resource. That resource underneath those potential pits is purely limited by drilling, which you can see on the right-hand side of that long projection.
The drilling per 100 meters in the top 250 meters equates to about 4,000 ounces per vertical meter, and that resource goes down to 1.6 km. Deep mineralization in this part of the world is not unusual. Places like Red Lake are mining successfully down to 2.5 km . Why does the opportunity exist here where it hasn't before? Historically, the only thing that was mined was quartz veins, and the cut-off grade that people were using back then was something around 8 grams per ton. Those quartz veins continue beyond the stopes that were already mined. In addition to that, historically, mineralization in an alteration halo around the quartz veins wasn't mined. Mineralization in banded iron formation wasn't mined, and neither was mineralization sitting in porphyries. That's where we see the opportunity.
Particularly in terms of applying open-pit mining rather than underground mining, which was applied before, is the ability to apply modern mining techniques, lower cut-off grades, and of course, at the moment, we've got a very conducive gold price environment. The resource that we're quoting there was presented in 2023 by FireFly at a gold price of AUD 1,850 per ounce. We're sitting now at double that. We're pretty excited about that potential. I've mentioned previously that sitting underneath that initial 260 meters that we're focusing on at the moment is another 1.9 million ounces at 8 grams. We're pretty excited that we've got mineralization commencing at surface. There's no pre-stripping that would be involved there. With whatever open pits we come up with, we've got mineralization sitting directly beneath them. I just mentioned earlier that there's mineralization that wasn't mined previously.
In terms of the quartz veins, you can see some of the intersections that FireFly achieved. There's some pretty nice widths and numbers sitting in that. This banded iron formation that I spoke about before, they're the sorts of numbers that were achieved previously as well. That mineralization just was not touched from previous mining. We're pretty excited by what we might find here. On top of that, this is some modern aeromagnetics that was flown by helicopter back in 2022. Prior to FireFly really focusing on Green Bay copper, they managed to do a preliminary structural analysis of this. What you can see is most of the mineralization sits along those major structures. There's more work that we can do in terms of analyzing the aeromagnetics and the structural model.
As you can see, that 500 sq km tenement package gives us a lot of potential for making new discoveries. One of the things that we're sitting with now is a really nice bank balance and a nice lead time into really having a look at this exploration package and making new discoveries. There's so much gold mineralization, as you can see, along- At least two structural corridors there that go for about 50 km that I can't believe that there's not going to be another deposit found there. Pickle Crow itself, it's already mined 1.5 million ounces. There's 2.8 million ounces in the current resource. That takes you to a pre-mining 4 to 5 million ounces just in the 2.5 km strike at Pickle Crow, in a tenement package that's just screaming out for more exploration.
Once we've done this initial program, looking at the top 260 meters, we're going to go out and do some more regional exploration, and we're very excited about the potential there. I'll just move on there to the project up in the Pilbara. This is a little bit different. What we've got up here is the Edmund Basin, which is a sedimentary basin sitting between the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons. We've got something called a hyper-enriched black shale, and within that black shale is a horizon that has disseminated sulfides, that's mineralized with base metals and every other metal that we're showing there in the second dot point. There's a lot of opportunity here. There's a couple of different horizons in that shale unit. There's a nickel horizon. A base metal horizon that's got predominantly zinc, copper, vanadium, and precious metals.
There's another horizon that's sitting with things like gallium. We're pretty excited about this, but it needs some work done on it in terms of process route. The company's had this asset for a couple of years, and what it's been working on is how do you process this material? What we've been looking at is heap leaching, using bioleaching. We've conducted test work on that over the last couple of years. The last set of test work we did was at the end of 2025 on ground material, and that delivered some really nice recoveries. The bulk sample that we've been taking in the last couple of months is going to be used for column leach tests, using bioleaching initially.
There is sulfides there, what we're wanting to see will work here is whether we can get the leaching process started with the bugs and then the sulfides will take over, generate acid and keep the leaching process going. There are a couple of these other projects like this in the world. One's in Finland, Talvivaara, and they use this process for production of metals. What we'd like to see is being able to get metals into solution and then use SX-EW to basically produce metal on-site. The next step there is some column leach tests and we're also going to have a look at the continuity of mineralization and have a look at how much drilling we need to do to get a maiden resource out here.
In terms of scale, the area that we've been focusing on is just that area in the red box, which I'll talk to in a little minute as far as our drilling's concerned. This tenement package goes for 140 km, so the scale of this thing could be quite phenomenal. Just in that small red box, we completed 4,000 meters of drilling back in June, July. What we've been doing is getting this bulk sample. We'll also get assay results out of that drilling, which we'll be putting out later this quarter. What we're going to look at is the mineralization continuity, and that'll tell us what drill spacing we need for a resource estimate in the rest of the area there. That area is about 5K by 2.5K, just that little area. The mineralized horizon's about 10 meters thick.
The potential here is for quite a large-scale deposit. Just wrapping up. We think pre-drilling results, pre-metallurgy out at Brumby and with ongoing drilling results, particularly up in Ontario where we've got two rigs operating now, for the rest of this year on that near-surface mineralization. That drilling will roll over into 2027 with exploration drilling. A lot of new flow coming up now and continuing. We're really well-funded and we think this is a really good time for investors to look at the stock, if they're looking for a value investment. Thank you.