The largest gold nugget ever found weighed as much as an adult man. When prospectors John Deason and Richard Oates discovered the massive chunk of gold in Australia, they went from being struggling working men to astonishingly wealthy overnight.
From 1851, lured by vast newfound gold fields in Western Australia, hundreds of thousands of men migrated to the colony for what became Australia’s gold rush. But while many gold-seekers found just modest quantities of the noble metal, two humble tin miners were to get the biggest break of their lives—the biggest of all time.
Their incredibly famous find took place on Feb. 5, 1869. Deason, an English tin miner who had lost his father at sea as a child, had set sail for Victoria 16 years earlier, in 1853, with hopes of making his fortune Down Under. Deason, who hailed from Cornwall and whose father had been a fisherman, was joined by his friend Oates, a fellow miner, a year later.
According to local newspaper the Bendigo Advertiser, the men had been struggling financially before the discovery and had even been refused credit to buy a bag of flour just one week prior. During the 15 years they‘d spent digging, they’d produced only small bits of gold. But one fortunate day in February Deason was working the surface at Bulldog Gully, close to the village of Moliagul, in Victoria, when his pick struck what felt like stone.
In a 1905 manuscript, Deason described how he was working around the roots of a tree that morning when he felt something about an inch below the surface: “I scraped the ground with the pick and saw gold; then I cleared away further and right round the nugget.”
He tried to pry up the nugget but broke the handle of his pick. So he used a crowbar and raised it. Encased in quartz, the nugget measured around 2 feet long and nearly as wide and deep. Deason’s son went off excitedly and summoned Oates, who was working a short distance away. They transported the nugget on a cart to Deason’s hut.
Reports stated that Deason’s wife Catherine was home when he returned and announced he had something to show her.
Accustomed to his habit of bringing people back to their lodging for a meal, she said, “I hope it’s not another unwelcome stranger.”
“No, it’s a welcome stranger,” he said.
The group placed the heavy haul in a fireplace, lit a fire, and let it burn for around ten hours. After it had cooled, they stayed up all night chipping quartz away to reveal gold. Several small pieces broke off, and the finders gave about 5 ounces to friends, according to Deason’s estimate.
At first, the finders undervalued the nugget’s worth by a large margin. “When my mate came,” Deason wrote, “I said, ‘What do you think of it, Dick. Is it worth 5,000 pounds?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘more like 2,000 pounds.’”
An official valuation found the total weight of gold was around 145 pounds. A local bank bought it for 9,563 pounds, around $3 million to $4 million in today’s money. With friends acting as bodyguards, the two partners chose London Chartered Bank in the town of Dunolly, ten miles away, to make their transaction rather than travel to Melbourne, as they feared being robbed en route.
A large, excited crowd assembled at London Bank to glimpse the golden nugget as a large police presence stood watch. The Welcome Stranger nugget, as it became known, was too ginormous to fit on the bank’s scale and had to be broken apart on an anvil. Once weighed, it was deemed 6 pounds heavier—and of purer gold—than the previous record-holder, Welcome Nugget, which was found over a decade earlier in Victoria.
Before month’s end, and before Welcome Stranger could be properly photographed, the nugget was melted down and the gold sent to England, leaving only drawings for posterity to fantasize from.
A century and a half has passed since the nugget’s incredible appearance. In 2019, John Tully, president of the Goldfields Historical and Arts Society in Dunolly, mentioned the astonishing discovery: “It’s significant. It’s the largest nugget ever found in the world,“ he said. ”There’s not too much of anything that can keep a record for 150 years.”
Notably, after the frenzy of the find had died down the newly rich former tin miners humbly returned to work as if little had happened. A local newspaper, the Dunolly & Bet Shire Express, who spoke with the finders that fortunate February, wrote: “We are glad that the monster has fallen to the lot of such steady and industrious men.”
