Category: Junior Mining

Subject: What Became of the Crow? Is the inside story of Novo Resources going from a twinkle in Quinton’s eye to production.

I first met Quinton in October of 2008 when it appeared the end of the world was right around the corner. On a 8 hour round trip to Wyoming to visit the Rattlesnake gold deposit we had lots of time to chat. He told me his theory about how gold was deposited in the Witwatersrand as oxygen produced by single cell creatures changed the chemistry of highly acidic sea water and gold precipitated out of solution and attached to carbon. It was a theory but an interesting theory.

A year later we made a trip to Perth to meet with Mark Creasy, the most successful prospector in Australian history. Mark knew Quinton’s theory and wanted to work with him. But rich guys are really hard to do deals with. Time is meaningless to them while time is a burning candle for a junior resource company. In any case a deal was done and Quinton was off to the races. A couple of days ago Novo made it’s first gold pour from the mill at Nullagine with ore from the Beatons Creek deposit. It’s hardly the beginning of the end but it is the end of the beginning.

I’ve run 321gold.com <http://321gold.com/>  for some twenty years and worked with over five hundred companies and been to hundreds of projects. I don’t know everyone in the industry yet, there are three guys I’m still trying to track down. But I got to be a fly on the wall from the concept stage to the deal stage to exploration and now to production with Novo. Quinton is my best friend and I have made a lot of money betting on his skill. I probably know more about Novo Resources than anyone outside the company. For most of the last nine years Novo has been my largest share position. I’ve visited Australia half a dozen times to all of their projects and written more about them than anyone else. I love the story.

I know of not a single book that tells the tale of a gold company from startup to production. I got to see it and live it. Now and again I got to participate on a small scale. What I saw often shocked me, it was the stuff you would like to know but have never been told before. I think that What Became of the Crow? could become a classic and must read for geologists, resource company management and potential or actual investors.

I put the book out a little while ago so people could start to get their hands on it just as Novo did their first pour at Nullagine. There are four different versions of exactly the same book. If you are on a budget, I put out a Kindle version on Amazon for $9.99. It’s already made it to #1 in the Natural Resource Extraction Industry. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WJRV2W8 There is a full color but paperback version on Amazon but it’s way overpriced at $51.99 which is pretty dumb because there is a beautiful hardback version of the book from Lulu for $49.99 if you go here https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/robert-moriarty-and-chris-webber-and-lászló-vanger-and-jeremy-irwin/what-became-of-the-crow/hardcover/product-vwkkv6.html?page=1&pageSize=4 <https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/robert-moriarty-and-chris-webber-and-l%C3%A1szl%C3%B3-vanger-and-jeremy-irwin/what-became-of-the-crow/hardcover/product-vwkkv6.html?page=1&pageSize=4>

If you want to know most of the real story behind Novo, you are going to want to read the book. If you are one of the people who have followed me since 2012, take my word, the hardback version is a beautiful book. If it seems overpriced, welcome to hyperinflation. That was literally the lowest price Lulu would allow me to sell it. But it’s a nice book.

It’s going to take fifty years before the Pilbara is fully developed. Novo has about 14,000 square km of ground and a lot of gold.

The book is a fun read and I highly recommend reading one or the other versions.