More than 170 years since Australia’s gold rush ended, one man has unearthed a nugget worth almost $250,000 in Victoria’s goldfields.
The man found the 4.6kg gold rock using an amateur metal detector in Victoria’s “golden triangle” between Bendigo, Ballarat and St Arnaud.
When the prospector took his find into Darren Kamp’s prospecting store in Geelong, Lucky Strike Gold, he asked the owner: “Do you think there’s $10,000 worth in it?”
Kamp said he often gets people coming in with fool’s gold but as soon as the weight of it hit his hands, “I looked at him and I said try $100,000”.
“He said ‘but that’s only half the rock, the other half is at home’.”
Kamp valued the rock in its entirety at $240,000 as today’s gold prices are nearing global record highs. The amount of gold in the rock came out at 83 ounces.
“I’ve been prospecting for 43 years. And I haven’t seen a specimen in this amount of gold in my 43 years of prospecting,” Kamp said. “Maybe in the 1850s there was probably a few found, but in today’s terms it’s very rare.
“I’ve dreamt of finding something this big myself. The largest I’ve ever found prospecting was 24 ounce 12 years ago.”
Part of the prospector’s “incredible” luck, Kamp said, is that he made the find with a $1,200 machine at the very lowest end of the pricing range for detectors. Kamp said that if the nugget had been any deeper than the 12 inches in the ground where it was found, only a more expensive machine could have picked it up.
Kamp bought the nugget off the prospector and named it “Lucky Strike”. A multimeter test confirmed the gold was interconnected throughout the rock, he said.
The Geological Survey of Victoria has predicted there could be as much as 75m ounces of undiscovered gold across the central and north central Victorian goldfields, compared with 80m ounces which has been mined from the area since the days of the gold rush.
Lynnie Hindle, the president of the Bendigo branch of the Prospectors and Miners Association of Victoria (Pmav), said: “If a big nugget is found, it always creates a new gold rush.”
Hindle said the popularity of gold prospecting had grown and a total of 50,000 people currently hold a miner’s right in Victoria.
The $25.50 licence lasts for 10 years and, without one, any gold found belongs to the crown.
Ian Holland, a professional goldminer of 40 years experience and president of the Ballarat branch of the association, said: “It’s not like a hell of a lot of gold’s being found but there’s more people out there than ever.
“When I used to drive around looking for gold in the in the crown land, you used to see one car a week. Now you’ll see five a day. That’s how much it’s grown.”
The two biggest nuggets Holland has found in the Victoria goldfields add up to 122 ounces, which valued at today’s gold prices would have been about $366,000, he said.
Lucky Strike is not the biggest nugget found in Australia – that honour belongs to “the Welcome Stranger” found near Moliagul, Victoria, in 1869, which yielded 2,300 ounces of gold.
