A gold rock weighing 4.6KG was found in Victoria’s golden triangle with 2.6KG of gold in it. https://apple.news/AZP8LjXprTSWo4bJBjwF-ig
It was found a while ago, just being publicised now by a metal detector dealer to spruce up sales for the Easter Holidays, traditionally the busiest prospecting shops trading period of the year. And no it was not found at St Arnaud but somewhere else in a completely different area. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story as they say!
St Arnaud is a relatively poor gold field not known for large gold nuggets/specimen finds. It has the distinction of producing some of the least pure gold in the state with a lot of silver and copper mixed in with it. It only produced 2 nuggets over 50 oz and nothing over 100 oz during the gold rushes of the 1800s despite all the thousands of miners digging all those many thousands of holes. Dunolly on the other hand produced 126 nuggets larger than 50 oz.
This is an 1853 Photo Chinese gold miners setting out for Ballarat, Victoria in a Cobb and Co. coach with mining gear at the back.
^^^^ That must have been some richer Chinese miners, as the majority walked "shanks pony" to the goldfields with their personal belongings and mining gear suspended on long bamboo sticks. The Chinese could carry some astronomical weights of well over 200 pounds that way for hundreds of miles! To try and discourage the Chinese from coming to Victoria, the colonial government imposed a tax on them to stem their flow. The Chinese overcame this measure by disembarking from their ships at Robe in South Australia and walking over 300 miles overland to the goldfields! And by the way, the above-mentioned nugget was found not too far out from Ballarat.
Nah not Clunes, in the opposite direction. Clunes was mainly a deep reefing goldfield requiring a lot of shareholder and syndicate capital to operate. There was little if any surface alluvial gold for the poor miners to find.
