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.
Welcome Stranger
The Welcome Stranger gold nugget was found in Moliagul, Victoria in 1869 by Jason Deason, and Richard Oates and is the biggest gold nugget ever found in Australia.
Our certified nuggets start at $50.00 and go up to several thousand dollars depending on the nugget size and the market price of gold. Our nuggets are weighed in pennyweight (DWT) 1 pennyweight equals 1.55 grams, 20 pennyweights equal 1 troy ounce.
Nothing excites a gold prospector more than the chance of finding a big piece of gold. Big gold nuggets are a rare object these days but it is still possible to find a decent size gold nugget in Western Australia.
An amateur gold digger has found an enormous gold nugget worth 240,000 AUD ($160,000) in Australia. Discovered in the state of Victoria in an area known as the “Golden Triangle,” the gold-filled rock weighs 4.6 kilograms (10.1 pounds), with the precious metal making up 2.6 kilograms (5.7 pounds).
In 1869, a 72kg gold nugget was found near Moliagul, also in Victoria.
Two Cornish miners unearthed the biggest golden nugget discovered in the area on February 5, 1869, near Moliagul. Dubbed the 'Welcome Stranger', the gold nugget weighed 72 kilograms, was 61cm long and sold for £10,000 ( roughly $18,475 AUD). Today, a nugget of that size would fetch approximately $ 6.8 million.
Your finds
If you find gold or other minerals on a mining tenement where you have have permission to prospect, then these may only be kept with the permission of the mining tenement holder.
In Victoria, most underground gold is found in "quartz reefs": bands of hard white quartz. Formed some 400 million years ago, these gold-bearing reefs may be kilometres long, but are typically less than a metre wide, and slant steeply into the ground. The places where these reefs break the surface were hard to find.
In Australia this concentration of gold took place in the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago in the eastern states, and thousands of millions of years ago in Western Australia. As well as gold, the fluids can carry other dissolved minerals, such as quartz. This is why gold is often found with quartz.
A two-kilogram gold nugget worth about $130,000 has been found on the outskirts of Victorian gold rush town Ballarat. A prospector, who asked to remain anonymous, found the nugget in an old pasture in June.
The largest gold nugget ever found was named “Welcome Stranger” and weighed 3,523.5 troy ounces when it was first pulled from the ground and produced 3,123 troy ounces (ozt) of gold when it was refined. The nugget weighed 241 lbs 10 oz when it was pulled from the ground.
Source: Office of the Chief Economist. Australia is estimated to have the world's largest gold reserves, with 9,500 tonnes or 17 per cent of the total world estimated gold reserves of 57,000 tonnes. Geoscience Australia estimates that 60 per cent of Australia's gold reserves are in Western Australia.
Victoria's gold-bearing rocks are sandstones, siltstones and mudstones, deposited in deep marine conditions some 400 million years ago. Today they form a bedrock spine that runs east to west through Victoria, with the Great Divide running along the crest of Victoria's Western and Eastern Uplands.
What makes Dahlonega gold so different from other gold found around the world is the purity. Dahlonega has the purest gold in the world, which is 98.7 percent pure.
The main destination of Gold exports from Australia are: China ($5.86B), Hong Kong ($2.33B), Singapore ($1.95B), India ($1.42B), and Switzerland ($1.33B). The fastest growing export markets for Gold of Australia between 2020 and 2021 were China ($4.73B), India ($1.14B), and Hong Kong ($1.03B).
On February 12, 1851, a prospector discovered flecks of gold in a waterhole near Bathurst, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Soon, even more gold was discovered in what would become the neighboring state of Victoria. This began the Australian Gold Rush, which had a profound impact on the country's national identity.
Cadia Valley Gold has officially remained Australia's most important producer. Newcrest Mining discovered a gold deposit at Cadia Hill and, in the same year, Cadia East was discovered.
It is illegal to buy or sell bullion bars except at a bank that has a precious metals license (and very few have them)… it is a criminal offense to buy or sell a gold bar from a friend or relative…
Physical gold, commonly known as gold bullion, is available to buy from registered dealers throughout Australia. However, it is important you do your research and have secure ways to store your bullion. If you want to add exposure to gold in your own portfolio, there are ways to invest without buying gold physically.
If you're fortunate enough to own gold nuggets, you can earn a small fortune now with the current high price of gold. At Cash For Old Gold, we offer you top market rates for your gold nuggets. We can even come to you, to value and assess the weight of your nuggets and carat, so you can earn cash on the spot.
The Canaan gold nugget was purchased in 1984 by the Banco Central do Brasil, and is now displayed in their money museum in Brasilia. The museum also contains two other, unnamed nuggets weighing 46.85kg and 43.34kg respectively, which were also mined in Serra Pelada.