An amateur prospector has dug up a gold nugget weighing more than a kilogram in the Australian outback and named his find the "Tibooburra Spud".
The man, who wished to remain anonymous, told the ABC he had been digging for days near Tibooburra, a remote town in far western New South Wales close to the Queensland and South Australian borders, when his metal detector picked up a signal.
“It wasn’t a loud signal for the size of the piece that it is [but] once I got down to 100 [millimetres] or something like that, the machine was squealing,” he said.
“It might have been on the first or second scrape I just seen this bright yellow dot in the centre of the hole.”
The quartz-flecked nugget weighs more than 1200 grams, 940 grams of which is pure gold.
At the spot price, it is worth between NZ$185,000 and NZ$197,000, but a planned sale to a collector could see it fetch up to NZ$246,000.
Footage of the discovery shows the out-of-breath prospector laughing in disbelief as he brushes dirt away from the nugget.
“Have a f***ing look at that, I can’t believe this,” he said in the video.
“It’s not even that deep, it’s probably only 400 [millimetres] deep.”
The man said he was used to coming up empty in his years of fossicking, digging up “lots of lead bullets, old timer’s nails, horseshoes”.
Broken Hill prospecting supplies seller Greg Spangler told the ABC he had seen only one other person find a nugget heavier than a kilogram in his 20-odd years in the business.
Most finds are gold flakes or small nuggets weighing a few ounces.
“We have a fictitious club [called] the Ounce Club … but not many people [are] in the ‘Kilo Club’,” Spangler said.
Gold prospecting around Tibooburra dates back to the late 1880s and draws many tourists to the area.
Fossicking is currently banned on the Tibooburra Common, the land surrounding the township, while native title permissions are pursued.
At least two stations in the region, Mount Stuart and Gumvale, allow fossicking for a fee.
SHARE ME