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‘We’re going to find it’: How three geologists discovered Hemi, the $5 billion gold mine no-one believed in

Phil Tornatora’s colleagues know him to be a man of few words, and those usually aren’t expletives. So it was a stray from his typical understated demeanour when fellow geologist at De Grey Mining, Andrew (Andy) Beckwith, received a call and a text in quick succession from him on a lazy January weekend in 2020. “I happened to be down at Margaret River with my family when Phil rang me on a Sunday morning and said ‘Have you seen the new results coming in for the new holes?’,” Mr Beckwith recalled. “And I said ‘No I have to go and have a look at them’. And then I got a text before I even got to see the results, and the text just said: ‘F*************rk!’ “Phil doesn’t swear very much, so I took notice.” The two of them, alongside final member of the geo trio Allan Kneeshaw, were completely unaware the initial results from their patch of dirt in the Pilbara had set in motion the uncovering of one of the biggest gold discoveries in WA history. Up until that point, the De Grey team and their years-long exploration mission, determined to prove the Pilbara wasn’t just iron ore country, had garnered little attention. The then-junior was another West Perth goldie like so many before them convinced their project could break through the trap of capital raisings and commodity cycles. Except the De Grey crew were right. After drilling at least 2200 holes over about four years over an area the length of Perth to Bunbury, De Grey by the end of 2024 had mapped out the heart of the Hemi gold system. The brand new discovery stretched across six zones — Aquila, Brolga, Crow, Diucon, Eagle and Falcon — and is believed to hold 11.2 million ounces of gold within those sections alone. Broadened out to regional deposits the ounces climb to 13.6 million. For context, anything over 2 million ounces in reserves, resources or past production is considered a “major discovery”. And based on a projected yearly output of at least 530,000 ounces of gold per year - Hemi will be thrusted into the top five biggest gold mines in Australia once built. ‘We’re going to find it’ Allan Kneeshaw — whose father made his name for his decades of dedication to advancing Pilbara iron ore exploration — said the discovery of Hemi “changed lives”, and ultimately came down to people willing to be open. “One of the quotable quotes about Hemi was ‘there’s no gold in the Pilbara’. We kept getting told that all the time, to the degree where we had a relationship with a couple of the major companies where we came from. . .and we were trying to get support back (at) the time. “Funding was hard and we were actually pushing the papers and the geological model to some of these guys and saying, ‘I think there’s something different out here and we really think you need to take it seriously.’ “And so that probably drove us, well it drove drive me especially to say actually there is something here, and we’re going to find it.” It was as the results from their reverse circulation and diamond drilling campaigns started to trickle in over February and March 2020 that the market started to take notice of what De Grey had found. “Every line was hitting mineralisation for a couple of months there,” Mr Tornatora, sender of the expletive text, recalls. “That’s when you really start to understand the scale that it could be.” Geologists can spend their entire careers driven by the belief that it’s them that’ll make the next big discovery; be it in the name of establishing their fortune, or in the name of scientific discovery. Those after fortune would have got it in this instance. Shares in De Grey pre-Hemi were going for about 5¢ apiece in late 2019, shot up to over 23¢ in March 2020 and were bought by Northern Star in a $5 billion scrip deal pricing the stock at about $2.08 in May 2025. Fork in the road The thrill and accomplishment the De Grey crew got to experience by quite literally discovering a gold mine, is one that few geos are ever lucky enough to have. It was certainly not on the mind of Andy Beckwith when he joined De Grey in 2016. “Why the hell am I in the Pilbara looking for gold?” he recalls thinking when he first flew up to have a look at the project. “Once I got there and started looking at all the smaller deposits they had already discovered as De Grey…I’m going ‘they’ve found a lot of gold wherever they’ve looked’. “The thought of a 13 million ounce discovery, or whatever it ends up being, that probably wasn’t on my mind at the time.” In stark contrast to the gold fever engulfing everyone from retail investors and central banks to aspiring prospectors today, the yellow metal couldn’t have been more out of vogue at the time. “It was more about, how do we keep this company alive? The market wasn’t very positive. Gold hadn’t really turned at all, and it was very difficult to raise money at the time,” Mr Beckwith says. So dire was the outlook that he feared the project could be on the chopping block. Adamant that there was more to the project than they thought, he implored the De Grey board not to sell. “I was pretty certain they were going to get rid of this project and turn the company into a tech stock…that was my feeling.” He considers that decision one of the most crucial inflection points in the Hemi timeline. Even before Hemi was uncovered in 2019 the tiddler was adamant their Pilbara project was worth 2 million ounces. Digging their heels in even further, the crew cobbled together $22 million later that year to buy tenements to the west from Indee Gold. Having skin in the game as a geologist in Australia means long stints on the road and long stretches of time away from families, but forges strong bonds between crews battling arid heat and testing conditions. During De Grey’s early years the crew would sleep in a “couple of beaten up old dongas” owned by local station owners Betty and Colin, who also set fairly high bars for use of the air conditioning. “Colin was really back-up, and if we didn’t get back, we were relying on him to find us,” Andy says. “We were using their generator,” Mr Tornatora recalls, “and Colin didn’t want us to put it on in the daytime; ‘What do you need air con for?’ (Being) in the office at 45 degrees is not much fun.” The next geologists After their own successful gold hunt, Andy, Allan and Phil are naturally huge advocates for their industry and the advances in science, and commerical upside, that it has to offer. But there is a pressing concern that the courses to train exploration geologists and mining engineers are on the decline, which has been broadly attributed to a perceived lack of interest in the mining sector. Macquarie University, the University of Newcastle, and the University of Wollongong (UOW) and the Australian National University have all closed or significantly scaled back their earth science programmes over the past decade, according to a recent senate submission by the Geological Society of Australia. Federation University only in November 2025 dropped its 155-year-old geoscience and geology studies, according to the ABC. “Maybe society thinks that geology and mining, it’s old and we don’t need it anymore,” Mr Kneeshaw says. “But for me, it’s representative of this big disconnect between electrifying everything, using batteries for energy storage, all the devices that we use to work more efficiently, and people have just completely forgotten where it all comes from. “And the fact that if we’re going to have a responsible society that’s looking after the environment, you still have to do it through geoscience as one of your foundations. It’s environment and geoscience. They go hand in hand.” New chapter The sale of De Grey as a company, and the Hemi project, to Northern Star in 2025, revealed more of an emotional attachment to what the crew had achieved than Andy realised. Aside from what he diplomatically recounts as a bit of “argy bargy” over the sale price, he’s happy to see WA’s next big gold mine in the hands of an Australian company. “I knew the story a little bit longer than everybody else . . .it was emotionally quite hard to separate the discovery being a geologist, being a corporate person. So that was the hardest thing for me. In the end, as a director, you have to do the best thing for shareholders. “The only other disappointment is it’s broken up our team.”

The West Australian exclusive‘We’re going to find it’: How three geologists discovered Hemi, the $5 billion gold mine no-one believed in

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‘We’re going to find it’: How three geologists discovered Hemi, the $5 billion gold mine no-one believed in