The five largest gold nuggets unearthed in Victoria’s gold rush
In the 1850s thousands of workers abandoned their jobs and rushed to Ballarat, Bendigo and surrounds to seek their fortune in gold. Here are the stories of Victoria’s biggest gold nuggets and the extraordinary prospectors who found them.
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2020 is about staying out of the regions and keeping indoors. In the 1850s it was the opposite.
The gold rush saw everyone from farmhands to office clerks abandoning their jobs to rush to Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Maldon to seek their fortune in gold.
From a miner who fainted when he unearthed a lump of gold, to a metal detector enthusiast whose discovery became a permanent Las Vegas exhibit, here are the stories of five of Victoria’s biggest gold nuggets and the extraordinary prospectors who found them.
5: THE HAND OF FAITH
Found: 1980, Kingower, northwest of Bendigo
Weight: 27.21kg
More than 120 years after the start of the gold rush in Victoria, enthusiast Kevin Hillier was wandering the hills near Bendigo with a metal detector.
When he detected something big beneath the surface he dug 30cm down to find a patch of gold about 9cm across.
To his astonishment the long, winding nugget extended another 47cm into the ground and measured 20cm at its widest point.
When it was extracted, it weighed a whopping 27.21kg — about the weight of two slabs of beer.
The find sent a flurry of excitement through Victoria with Premier Dick Hamer attending the press conference to announce the nugget’s discovery.
The Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas bought the nugget for more than $1 million.
It remains on display where gamblers hope to replicate Kevin Hillier’s incredible luck.
4: THE HERON
Found: 1855, Mount Alexander goldfield near Castlemaine
Weight: 31.4kg
As gold fever gripped Victoria and the populace headed to the diggings, land was sliced up in to small mining areas called claims.
When a claim was found to be empty, it was sometimes flogged off to naive new arrivals looking to find their fortune.
According to some accounts, such a dodgy sale backfired in 1855 when a group of inexperienced miners bought an abandoned claim that was supposed to be empty, only to uncover one of the biggest nuggets ever found.
On just their second day of digging in the modest plot, the lucky men unearthed a clump of gold
It was sold in England for £4080 — a huge fortune that transformed the rookie diggers’ lives.
It is believed the Heron nugget was named after a Victorian goldfields administrator.
3: LADY HOTHAM
Found: 1854, Canadian Gully, Ballarat
Weight: 36kg
While countless miners struggled to survive in fruitless diggings across Victoria, gold was coming almost effortlessly to some.
Certain spots in Ballarat, including the so-called Canadian Gully, were spitting up so much gold, jewellers in Melbourne could barely keep up.
John Dalton is believed to have found a huge nugget weighing 36kg with his team of English and Scottish diggers just outside Ballarat, which they named Lady Hotham after the wife of Governor Charles Hotham.
When a newspaper reporter visited the men’s dig shortly after the nugget was unearthed, another 11kg of gold in smaller fragments had been washed out of two buckets of earth.
A total of more than 90kg of gold was taken from Dalton’s claim around the time the Lady Hotham was discovered.
2: THE WELCOME NUGGET
Found: 1858, Bakery Hill, Ballarat
Weight: 68.98kg
A team of 22 miners from Cornwall made a jaw-dropping discovery after trying their luck in diggings around the state and settling on a lucky plot in Ballarat.
So the (probably embellished) story goes, the owners of the claim left a hired man to dig while they went to have a meal.
The worker, upon striking the nugget and pulling it from the ground, fainted.
When a second man arrived and thought the digger lying on the ground had died, he too fainted when he caught sight of the huge nugget.
The Welcome Nugget was sold in Melbourne for £10,500 (about $4 million in today’s money) and was resold a year later for a slightly smaller amount.
After being displayed in London’s Crystal Palace, the nugget was purchased by the Royal Mint, which melted it down to make gold sovereign coins.
At the time it was the largest nugget ever found.
The site of the discovery is near the modern intersection of Mair St and Humffray St in Ballarat, close to Ballarat Coles and Pizza Hut.
1: THE WELCOME STRANGER
Found: 1869, Moliagul, west of Bendigo
Beneath a tree on a hillside at a remote digging in 1869, John Deason and Richard Oates from Cornwall made an astounding discovery.
Sitting just 3cm below the surface was lying an absolute monster.
Weighing an unbelievable 78kg, about the average weight of an adult, there existed no set of scales that could weigh a gold nugget of such extraordinary size.
The gold eventually had to be cut by a blacksmith into three pieces to be weighed and valued.
The pair were paid £9300 for the gold, which was melted down and sold off in Melbourne.
But for Deason, the wealth made by the nugget didn’t last long.
After a series of bad investments he died in 1915 with only a little money.
Oates purchased 800 acres of land near Marong where he lived with his family until his death in 1906.
A monument in Moliagul Marks the spot where the nugget was found and a statue was later erected in the town of Redruth, England, commemorating Deason and Oates’ discovery.
The Welcome Stranger remains the largest nugget ever found anywhere on the planet.
But prospectors who still take to the hills in Victoria’s old goldfields hope an even bigger nugget might be hiding just below the surface.
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