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An Australian gold digger couldn’t believe his ears when experts told him the huge “dirty rock” he found in the latest round of exploration was actually a nugget worth $160,000.

Equipped with a metal detector worth just $800, which is considered cheap among professional hunters, the man discovered the 4.6 kilogram rock covered in dust and mud. He mined it thinking it had some potential and estimated it could be worth at least $12,000.

His surprise was huge when he took it to the Lucky Strike Gold Prospecting Shop for evaluation late last year. “He pulled out this rock and when he put it in my hand, he said, ‘Do you think it’s worth 10,000 Australian dollars?'” store owner Darren Kamp told the BBC. This is approximately US$6,700.

“I looked at him and replied: ‘Do you mean 100,000 Australian dollars?'” he said of his meeting with the amateur search engine, who did not want to be identified. Camp was even more surprised when his customer told him that he had taken only part of the stone.

The rock was very dirty, so whoever found it could not see the gold clearly from the outside, so he broke it into two pieces because he thought there might be a nugget inside. Once it was cleaned, “you could see gold coming out of the rock everywhere,” Kamp said.

Image of “gold rock” posted by Lucky Strike Gold on Facebook

Biggest shock in 43 years of career

More than half of the 4.6 kilogram rock contained precious metal, worth 240,000 Australian dollars or 160,000 US dollars. The man made major discoveries in the Victorian gold fields, which were the center of Australia’s gold rush in the 19th century.

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Kamp, who valued and purchased the specimen, assured the BBC that it was the “largest” nugget he had seen in his 43-year career. “I was blown away…this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.”

When he saw his customer walk into his store carrying a giant backpack in Geelong, about an hour south-west of Melbourne, he wasn’t expecting much. “Typically, people come in with fake gold or other rocks that look like gold but are not,” he explained.

Kamp named it “The Nugget of the Lucky Stroke” (Lucky Strike Nugget) and noted that it was detected with low-budget models from the Minelab Equinox brand. “It shows that an $800 machine can find gold.”

In fact, their store has seen an increase in sales of metal detectors in recent months, perhaps because interest rates are also rising in Australia and people are looking for new ways to supplement their income.

In early March, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) raised interest rates for the tenth consecutive time to 3.6%, the highest level for the central bank’s benchmark interest rate since May 2012.

Gold again rose above the key $2,000 level. Spot, the precious metal rose 0.8% to $2,005.79 an ounce, while US gold futures rose 0.8% to $2,019.00.

“You only need two gold pieces.”

The largest sample of gold found by Kamp was a 24-ounce piece, which would now be worth about 70,000 Australian dollars ($46,753). He told that about 10 years ago his friend had found 600 ounce gold nuggets.

Currently the price of one gram (0.035 ounce) of gold is approximately AUD 94 ($63). “It’s worth exploring,” Kamp said. “You only need two small pieces and that’s basically 200 (Australian) dollars.”

In 2020, gold prospectors in South Australia found two large nuggets worth AUD350,000 ($250,000) in historic gold deposits. In 2013, an amateur searcher discovered an item worth at least $300,000.

The discovery of rich gold deposits in the Ballarat and Bendigo areas of Victoria in 1851 led to a series of gold rushes in Australia in the 1850s. The largest ever found was the “Holtermann Nugget”, which weighed over 90 kilograms.

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