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Morella Corporation Limited
Morella explores for lithium and battery minerals and also runs a drilling business that serves other mining companies.
Morella is a small Australian mining company with two jobs that sit at opposite ends of the resources business. One side hunts for lithium and other battery metals — the raw ingredients that go into electric car batteries and energy storage. The other side owns a drilling business that takes rigs out to other mining companies and bores holes in the ground so those companies can figure out what is buried beneath their land.
That drilling work is the more concrete part of the business. Before a miner spends huge money building a mine, it needs core samples — cylinders of rock pulled out of the earth — to know whether the ore is rich enough to bother. Morella's rigs and crews do that physical work, and the mining companies pay it for the holes, the samples, and the data. It is a services business: Morella gets paid whether or not the customer's ground turns out to be a winner, which makes it steadier than pure exploration. The exploration side is the lottery ticket. Morella holds its own projects and looks for lithium and other battery minerals, hoping to find a deposit valuable enough to develop or sell. That is high-risk, high-reward work — most exploration holes come up empty, and even a good find can take years and piles of cash before it becomes a mine. The company's history reflects that rollercoaster: it was once known as Altura Mining, a name tied to lithium ambitions that did not end happily, and it took on the Morella name as it rebuilt around a smaller exploration portfolio and the drilling services arm.
For a company this size, the real story is survival and optionality. The drilling revenue helps keep the lights on while the exploration projects chase a big discovery, and investors are essentially betting that one of those projects — or the services business itself — grows into something bigger. The risks are the obvious ones for a tiny miner: thin cash reserves, projects that may never pan out, and the constant need to raise money from shareholders. There is no dividend and no fortress balance sheet here — just a small, scrappy outfit swinging at two very different pitches.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026
Timeline
A Miner Is Born in West Perth
Morella Corporation Limited started life in 2000 in West Perth, Australia, under a different name: Altura Mining Limited. It was a small outfit with big ambitions in the ground beneath Western Australia.
Altura Lists on the ASX
A year later, Altura joined the Australian Securities Exchange, selling new shares to the public at 20 cents each and raising $3 million. That money was the launch fuel for a young mining company.
Altura Says No to a Takeover
In 2018, someone came knocking with an offer to buy control of the company. Altura turned it down, deciding the price did not reflect its true worth. Instead, it bet on itself, pouring its energy into getting its Pilgangoora lithium project built and running, and becoming a real producer rather than just a developer.
Altura Becomes Morella
In December 2021, the company swapped its old name, Altura Mining Limited, for a new one: Morella Corporation Limited. Same company, fresh identity, as it looked to write its next chapter.
Drilling Starts at Tabba Tabba East
By mid-2024, Morella was back in the field, starting the first phase of drilling at Tabba Tabba East. The target was lithium-bearing pegmatites in Western Australia, part of a wider push to find the rocks that could power the company's future.
Mt Edon Rubidium Resource Arrives
Morella's October 2026 investor presentation put its Mt Edon rubidium project in Western Australia front and center. The project's first resource estimate came in at about five and a half million tonnes, holding roughly 8,300 tonnes of rubidium oxide. Lab tests showed they could pull up to 93.6% of the rubidium out of the rock, a strong sign the project could actually work.
A Joint Venture Adds Four Projects
Morella signed a non-binding term sheet with joint venture partner Elevra Lithium to bring four more Western Australian projects into the fold: Deep Well, Mt Dove, Mount Satirist and Station Peak. Morella could earn a 51% stake by spending $300,000 on exploration over two years, and it would run the show as manager and operator.
Money Raised and a Court Fight Continues
The company's 2026 financial year showed it had pulled in $2.1 million from a two-tranche placement and $1.4 million from unsecured convertible notes. A 17-hole drilling campaign at Mt Edon hit pegmatites in 15 of the holes, which led to the first resource estimate there. And Morella was still fighting in Federal Court against the former receivers and managers over the 2020 sale of Altura's old lithium operations, a legal battle that kept the past alive.