A shocked Australian gold hunter has made a life-changing discovery when he unearthed a massive gold nugget estimated to be worth up to $100,000.
Luke Phillips found the nearly 1kg nugget in bushland near Ballarat in Victoria’s Goldfields region in May.
His friend Andrew filmed the shocking discovery, which came after Mr Phillips decided to persist with his search in the rain after initially finding only lead.
The father-of-two, who posted the video on his Dig It Detecting YouTube channel, found some smaller chunks of gold near the surface, totalling 0.6g.
But the largest nugget had been buried deep underground, almost a metre below the surface.
Mr Phillips’ metal detector had picked up some faint signals beneath a tree trunk and he proceeded to dig for more than an hour.
“This is probably the deepest target I’ve ever dug for gold,” he says in the video.
But the excavation was worth it.
Luke Phillips (pictured), from Victoria, dug for more than an hour after his metal detector picked up a faint sound beneath a log.
The gold nugget (pictured) was three feet underground and the father of two couldn’t believe his luck.
“My God! We didn’t dig that deep for no reason,” he said after unearthing the massive gold nugget.
‘Oh my god!
‘You won’t need glasses for that: all that is gold.
“I had never witnessed, seen or experienced anything like this. I knew I was digging for something, but I didn’t expect it to be this.
“I was hoping it was a horseshoe.”
His friend suggested that they should split it in half if the nugget weighed more than an ounce.
“I feel really jealous now,” Andrew said.
After admiring it on the ground for a while and measuring it against its container, Mr. Phillips finally pulled it out of the ground.
“Oh my God. What a load of crap!” he said.
“Everything is gold. Everything is gold.”
‘I never thought I’d come to this day where I’d unearth a nugget of gold.
‘It’s like an egg… that’s like a fucking egg!’
The nugget (pictured) is believed to be worth up to $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 given the current price of gold per ounce is $3,000, it could have been worth around $80,000.
But because large nuggets are rare, they can often sell for six figures.
Last year, another Australian gold hunter found a nugget in the same region of Victoria’s Golden Triangle, which consists of Bendigo, Ballarat and Wedderburn.
The find earned the amateur gold prospector a whopping $200,000 after he found a rock containing the metal.
The Goldfields region experienced a gold rush between 1851 and 1871, when Australia’s population increased from 430,000 to 1.7 million as people from all over the world came in search of its riches.
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