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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt might have been on the first or second scrape I just seen this bright yellow dot in the centre of the hole.\u201d<\/p>\n
The quartz-flecked nugget weighs more than 1200 grams, 940 grams of which is pure gold.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Footage of the discovery shows the out-of-breath prospector laughing in disbelief as he brushes dirt away from the nugget.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave a f***ing look at that, I can\u2019t believe this,\u201d he said in the video.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not even that deep, it\u2019s probably only 400 [millimetres] deep.\u201d<\/p>\n
The man said he was used to coming up empty in his years of fossicking, digging up \u201clots of lead bullets, old timer\u2019s nails, horseshoes\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Most finds are gold flakes or small nuggets weighing a few ounces.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a fictitious club [called] the Ounce Club \u2026 but not many people [are] in the \u2018Kilo Club\u2019,\u201d Spangler said.<\/p>\n
Gold prospecting around Tibooburra dates back to the late 1880s and draws many tourists to the area.<\/p>\n
Fossicking is currently banned on the Tibooburra Common, the land surrounding the township, while native title permissions are pursued.<\/p>\n
At least two stations in the region, Mount Stuart and Gumvale, allow fossicking for a fee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An amateur prospector has dug up a gold nugget weighing more than a kilogram in the Australian outback…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[85,138,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-642645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}