The world’s largest gold nugget: What happened after the discovery

According to official data, about a thousand gold nuggets weighing more than a kilogram were mined in the gold mines of Victoria in Australia, which was named the “Golden Triangle”. It can be assumed that the real figure is at least twice as high as the official data, since large nuggets are rarely publicly announced. But the biggest known nugget is called “Welcome Stranger”, which means “Welcome, stranger”. It was found in the 19th century by two Australian miners.

John Deason and Richard Oates find a gold nugget

This event took place on February 5, 1869, in a sparsely populated Australian area, near the mining town of Moliagul, Victoria. Two miners, John Deason and Richard Oates, stumbled upon a huge stone that would go down in the history of gold mining forever.

What prompted the two friends to start digging under the roots of a huge eucalyptus tree remains a mystery, but just a few centimeters from the surface of the earth, the pickaxe of one of them suddenly came across something solid. When the miner bent down to inspect the large stone, he discovered a giant gold nugget. It was so big that the friends couldn’t believe their eyes at first, and one of them exclaimed, “Welcome, Stranger!”, which later solidified the name of this unique stone.

Deason and Oates discussed the find excitedly, but in low voices, consulting on what to do with it next. They waited until sunset, then dug out the golden stone under the cover of darkness and took it to Dizon’s hut. Then a fire was lit to burn the fragments of the tree’s roots and shatter the black quartz covering the golden metal. They did this all day, and the next morning, having safely hidden the cleaned nugget weighing 72 kilograms, they gave the quartz chipped from the nugget for local stamping, from which they extracted another 60 ounces of gold.

The miners deposited the gold in the bank and received an amount for it that they could earn only in half a century

After discussing for a long time what to do with the hidden nugget, Dizon and Oates decided that it was better to get rid of it quickly, without attracting the attention of local authorities and robbers. Visit. A F R I N I K . C O M . For the full article. The miners agreed that the best solution would be to take it to the bank and get paid for it.

The nugget turned out to be too big to weigh on the bank scales, and the friends had to take it in a wheelbarrow to a local blacksmith, who cut the gold stone into three smaller pieces, of which they sold 66 kilograms to the bank, and kept the rest for themselves. Because of these manipulations, there are various rumors about the actual weight of the nugget, but the figure of 72 kilograms is the closest to the truth.

The bank paid 9,563 pounds for the nugget, which at that time was equivalent to the average salary of a miner for 40-50 years. Thus, John Deason and Richard Oates immediately became rich people. Were they able to properly manage their wealth, and did they fall victim to fraud? History gives a detailed answer to this.

What happened to John Deason and Richard Oatson, and where is the nugget now?

After such a successful find, John Deason was still engaged in gold mining for some time, and then opened his store, but lost most of his fortune due to unsuccessful investments, and with the remaining money, he bought a small farm near Moliagul, where he spent his last years farming.

Richard Oates briefly went to England, got married, and then returned to Australia with his wife, also acquired his 800-acre farm, where he lived with his family for the rest of his life. He had four children, whose descendants still live in these places today.

The memory of that find is preserved by a granite obelisk erected at the site of the discovery of the “Welcome Stranger”. There is another memorial in Dunolly, and in the middle of a parking lot in Redruth, England, there is a statue depicting two miners digging up a gold nugget.

In 2019, on February 5, the day the stone was found, the descendants of Deason and Oates, along with their family members, gathered in Moliagul to celebrate the 150th anniversary and recreate photos of this event.

During the Victorian gold rush, Moliagul was a small but prosperous Australian city with a population of 16,000 people and eleven pubs. It is currently a predominantly farming community with few houses, but gold seekers are still drawn to these places, known as the Golden Triangle.