Gold Nuggets of Australia

Australia was, and is, home to some of the most amazing discoveries of gold the world has seen. This is mainly due to the fact that much of the gold was found on the surface. Some finds changed the nation entirely, such as those in Ballarat in Victoria and Bathurst in New South Wales.

Gold nuggets are naturally occurring lumps of gold. These are recovered either by placer mining (mining the gold in deposits where the veins—thin layers of gold contained in rock—are weathered).

A single, small- to medium-sized gold nugget could turn a poor miner into a rich man, and nugget discoveries could turn underworked fields or empty farmland into thriving tent villages with thousands of miners looking to locate the next “big one”. Some of these places where gold was found over 150 years ago are towns today. Many of the largest gold nuggets ever formed on Earth were found in Australia. In fact, eight out of the top ten were found there.

The Welcome Nugget was by far the largest nugget ever found when it was discovered. It was found in June 1856 by a team of approximately 20 miners at Bakery Hill, Ballarat. It was dug out of a tunnel at a depth of 55 metres. The Welcome Nugget weighed 69.98 kilograms, and it was melted down a little over a year later, in 1859. Despite its size, the Welcome’s fame was short-lived.

An even bigger nugget was found ten years later, when on 5th February 1869 the Welcome Stranger nugget was discovered in a small town named Moliagul. A miner named Deason was digging at Bulldog Gully when he first thought he had struck a large stone just under the surface. However, after digging only three centimetres, he was delighted to see the twinkle of gold. With the help of his companion, Oates, Deason was able to free the monster from the roots of a native Australian tree.

This discovery was the world’s largest ever recorded gold nugget. There are some differing reports on the exact weight of the Welcome Stranger nugget, but the most well-known rating was 2,284 troy ounces (71 kilograms). It measured 60 by 30 centimetres and could not be weighed in the district as they did not have scales large enough. At today’s gold exchange rate, the Welcome Stranger would be worth over $2,000,000. A stone monument marks where it was found.

In 1985, at the Mount Alexander goldfield in Victoria, a group of inexperienced miners were sent by other miners to a site in Golden Gully that was believed to be empty of gold. Such spots were called duffer claims because they were thought to be useless. However, in this case the plan backfired. On their second day of digging, the miners unearthed a 1,008-ounce (28.5 kilograms) gold nugget which would change their lives forever. The nugget was named after a gold commissioner called Mr Heron. The Heron Nugget was the seventh-largest nugget in the world when discovered.

More recently, the Hand of Faith was found behind a primary school in the state of Victoria by an amateur metal collector named Hillier. The nugget was in a vertical position only about 15 centimetres below the surface. It measures 47 by 20 centimetres and is still on display at a casino in Las Vegas named The Golden Nugget, which bought it for US $1,000,000. Interestingly, the school where it was found is only approximately 30 miles from where the Welcome Stranger nugget was found in 1869.

The nugget Hillier found in 1980 was, and is, the largest known nugget found anywhere in the world by a metal detector. It weighs 27.21 kilograms, making it also the largest still in existence. As noted above, much larger nuggets were discovered in the 1850s, but these were melted down to decrease the chances of theft and to change the gold into a form that would be easily sold.

While the largest nugget of gold ever found is the Welcome Stranger, it is not the largest mass of gold ever found. The Holtermann “nugget” is not technically a nugget: in 1872 it was cut from an incredibly rich vein at Hill End, New South Wales, by a prospecting company in which Holtermann was a partner. The specimen also had quartz in it and weighed a whopping 286 kilograms. It was estimated that 3,000 ounces (85 kilograms) of gold were extracted when the giant was crushed. Only the top of the specimen remains, cut off by Holtermann as a souvenir.

Amazingly, this was not the only gigantic piece of gold cut from Hill End’s mine; an even larger specimen was drilled from the same vein some months later. This second monster was broken up below ground, as there seemed no point struggling with it up to the surface only to have it crushed. Its estimated weight was around 318 kilograms, and it yielded approximately 5,000 ounces (142 kilograms) of gold.

Gold has been a major part of Australia’s development and continues to have huge effects on the nation. It is possible that even larger nuggets and gold deposits still exist, although as years and technology progress, it is not very likely.