A stunned Australian prospector has made a “life-changing” discovery when he unearthed a huge gold nugget estimated to be worth $100,000.
Luke Phillips found the nearly 1kg nugget in May in bushland near Ballarat in Victoria’s Goldfields region.
His friend Andrew filmed the astonishing discovery, which was made after Mr Phillips decided to continue his search in the rain after initially only finding lead.
The father of two, who posted the video to his YouTube channel Dig It Detecting, subsequently found several smaller pieces of gold close to the surface, weighing a total of 0.6 grams.
But the largest piece of rock lay deep underground, almost a meter below the surface.
Mr. Phillips’ metal detector picked up a weak signal under a log and he proceeded to dig for over an hour.
“This is probably the deepest point I’ve ever dug for gold,” he says in the video.
The digging was worth it.
Luke Phillips (pictured) from Victoria dug for more than an hour after his metal detector picked up a faint sound under a log
The nugget (pictured) was found three feet underground and the father of two couldn’t believe his luck.
“Holy crap! Man, we didn’t dig that far for nothing,” Mr. Phillips said after unearthing the massive nugget.
Oh my God!
‘You don’t need glasses for that, that’s completely gold.
“I’ve never seen or experienced anything like it. I knew I was digging for something, but I didn’t expect it to be this.
“I expected it to be a horseshoe.”
His friend suggested taking half if the nugget weighed more than 28 grams.
“I’m really jealous now,” Andrew said.
After admiring it in the ground for a while and comparing it to his tank, Mr. Phillips finally dug it out of the ground.
“Oh my God. What a f**king mess,” he said.
“It’s all gold. It’s all gold.”
‘I never thought I would ever dig up a gold nugget.
“It’s just like an egg… that’s just like an egg!”
The gold nugget (pictured) is said to be worth around $100,000, given its rare size
Once on the scales, the nugget weighed 868.4 grams, or 30.632 ounces.
It is not known how much the father of two sold his nugget for, but based on the current gold price per ounce of $3,000, it could have been worth around $80,000.
But because large gold nuggets are rare, they can often sell for amounts of up to a ton.
Just last year, another Australian prospector found a nugget in the same Golden Triangle region of Victoria, which consists of Bendigo, Ballarat and Wedderburn.
The amateur prospector earned a whopping $200,000 from the find after finding a rock containing the metal.
Between 1851 and 1871, the Goldfields region experienced a gold rush, with Australia’s population growing from 430,000 to 1.7 million. People from all over the world came here in search of wealth.
