Gold digger: Australian man discovers giant gold nugget worth $250,000

An Australian man struck gold, quite literally, in the state of Victoria as he landed upon a massive gold nugget worth a whopping $250,000. With an amateur metal detector in hand, the man scanned through Victoria’s “golden triangle” between Bendigo, Ballarat and St Arnaud and was able to unearth the heavy 4.6kg gold rock, The Guardian reported.

The man, who does not wish for his name to be revealed, took his shiny discovery to a prospecting store in Geelong. Darren Kamp, the owner of Lucky Strike Gold, was asked by the man if he thinks there’s "$10,000 worth in it?” At first, Kamp thought that the gold was fake, but once he held the heavy rock in his hands: “I looked at him and I said try $100,000."

The cherry on top was that the man brought only half the rock, as the other part of it was lying somewhere inside his home. After extraction, the rock was valued at $240,000 with 83 ounces of gold. Kamp, who has been in the prospecting business for 43 years, said that this is for the first time in his career that he has seen such a "a specimen in this amount of gold".

Man with 'incredible' luck discovers gold nugget dubbed 'Lucky Strike'

"Maybe in the 1850s there was probably a few found, but in today’s terms it’s very rare. I’ve dreamt of finding something this big myself. The largest I’ve ever found prospecting was 24 ounce 12 years ago," he said. According to Kamp, the man who discovered the nugget had "incredible" luck, as he was able to find the prized item with a regular $1,200 detector, the lowest end of the tool's price range.

If the rock, now named “Lucky Strike", had been stuck 12 inches below the ground it was found, it would be impossible for the man's cheap machine to detect it. But the giant gold nugget is probably not the last of its kind, according to the Geological Survey of Victoria, which has said that central and north central Victorian goldfields could still possess as much as 75m ounces of gold that is still up for grabs.