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Posts tagged ‘Australian gold prospecting’

22
Dec

Gold Detecting Australia

Gold detecting 

Gold prospecting in Victoria Australia

Victoria contributed more than one third of the world’s gold output in the 1850s and in just two years the State’s population had grown from 77,000 to 540,000!

Australia attracted adventurers from all around the world. The majority of these new arrivals were British but also included Americans, French, Italian, German, Polish and Hungarian exiles.The largest foreign contingent on the goldfields was the 40,000 Chinese who made their way to Australia.

At the end of the gold rush decade, the population of Victoria had reached over 500,000 – a dramatic increase from 80,000 in 1851 – and over 25 million ounces of gold had been extracted from the Victorian fields, the equivalent of eleven billion dollars today. View Australian gold nuggets for sale

 

3
Apr

Worlds Third Largest Gold Nugget Found

The third largest gold nugget in the world


Just a few weeks ago, the Western Australian gold prospectors assembled for their annual meeting at the pub in Ora Banda, a hamlet in the Western Australian outback. At the end of the meeting a nugget buyer from Perth, a guy named Andy Comas, made quite an interesting announcement: he recently acquired and sold a nugget weighing 23.26 kilogram, making it the world’s third largest gold nugget in existence (just after the Hand of Faith at 27.21 kg and the Normandy Nugget at 25.5 kg). When Andy showed a picture of the monster the bar went dead quiet. People just couldn’t take their eyes of it. This was of course what every prospector dreams of and keeps him going: the bloody big one!

The nugget had been found a couple of weeks ago with a metal detector somewhere in the goldfields around here. Through various tests it had been established that the thing has a 92% purity. With today’s gold price of around 40 US Dollars a gram, the gold value of this baby would be around 860.000 dollars. But of course, nuggets of that rarity go for two, three times the gold value.

Anyway, Andy said that the prospector who found it, and who wishes to remain anonymous, gave him a week to sell it. Andy sold it for an undisclosed sum within a couple of days to a buyer in the US. No Australian could come up with the money, somewhat surprising with all the filthy rich mining executives around here.

Most prospectors in the room expressed regret or even outrage that this nugget would leave the country — although no doubt they would have done the exact same thing: sell it to the highest bidder.

And they even might get their wish because the story doesn’t end here. The Australian government might declare the nugget a National Treasure — and I think they should — and then Andy wouldn’t be able to export it.

gold prospecting pick

 

16
Jun

10.5 Ounce Gold Nugget Found with Metal Detector

Australian gold nugget

Australian gold nugget

Hi,My wife and I went to Western Australia recently on a Gold detecting trip,we camped out on abandoned mining sites and bush camped in other areas around Laverton and Leonora.

We were self sufficient with generator ,solar panel and satellite tv. We picked up the odd nugget here and there over a two week period, Then on the day of our 38 th wedding anniversary we went out detecting. I was using a modified Minelab GP Extreme and my wife was using a Minelab 2200D. Read more »