Brightstar’s Sandstone gold hub: mine design and sequencing notes for planners
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Brightstar Resources plans to turn its Sandstone project in Western Australia into a long-life, district-scale gold hub by consolidating multiple deposits within haulage distance of a central processing plant. The company is targeting higher-grade open pit and potential underground feed to restart and expand production, leveraging existing infrastructure from historic operations at Sandstone. For geotechnical and mine planners, the strategy points to staged cutback designs, regional pit sequencing, and possible plant debottlenecking rather than a single-mine development.
Technical Brief
- For similar Western Australian goldfields, such hub concepts can materially reduce unit haulage and processing costs.
Our Take
With both Brightstar Resources at Sandstone and New Murchison Gold’s Crown Prince mine in production ramp-up, our coverage suggests the Murchison–Sandstone corridor is moving from exploration-led to production-led gold activity, which can tighten competition for contractors and skilled labour in this part of Western Australia.
Among the 256 gold‑tagged pieces in our database, Sandstone‑style brownfields plays in Australia feature heavily, signalling that incremental expansion around historic camps is currently favoured over remote greenfields builds for gold developers.
For a gold project like Sandstone in Australia, the recent outperformance at Crown Prince indicates that near‑mine resource upside and grade control can materially shift early cash flow profiles, something lenders and offtakers increasingly scrutinise in project finance termsheets.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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