A stunned Aussie gold hunter has made a ‘life-changing’ discovery by digging up a huge gold nugget estimated to be worth up to $100,000.
Luke Phillips found the almost-1kg nugget in bushland near Ballarat in Victoria’s Goldfields region in May.
His friend Andrew filmed the astonishing discovery, which came after Mr Phillips decided to persist with his search in the rain after initially only finding lead.
The father-of-two, who posted the video on his YouTube channel Dig It Detecting, went on to find some smaller pieces of gold close to the surface, totalling 0.6g.
But the larger nugget had been buried deep underground – nearly a metre below the surface.
Mr Phillips’ metal detector had picked up some weak signals underneath a tree log 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 the dig was worth it.
Luke Phillips (pictured) from Victoria dug for over an hour after his metal detector picked up a faint sound under a log
The gold nugget (pictured) was three feet underground and the father-of-two couldn’t believe his luck
‘Holy smokes! Mate, we didn’t dig that far for no reason,’ he said after unearthing the massive nugget of gold.
‘Oh my God!
‘You won’t need glasses for that – that’s all gold.
‘I’ve never ever witnessed or seen or experienced something quite like this. I knew I was digging down to something but I didn’t expect it to be this.
‘I expected it to be a horseshoe.’
His friend suggested they should go halves if the nugget weighed more than an ounce.
‘I feel really jealous now,’ Andrew said.
After admiring it in the ground for a while and measuring it against his container, Mr Phillips’ finally dug it out of the ground.
‘Oh my God. What a f**king clump,’ he said.
‘It’s all gold. It’s all gold.’
‘I never thought I would see this day where I was going to unearth a nugget.
‘It’s like an egg … that’s like a freaking egg!’
The nugget (pictured) is believed to be worth up to $100,000, given its rare size
Once on the scales, the nugget came in at 868.4gms – or 30.632 ounces.
It is unknown how much the father-of-two sold his nugget for, but based on the current gold price per ounce being $3,000, it could have been worth around $80,000.
But because big nuggets are rare, they can often sell for six figures.
Just last year, another Aussie gold hunter found a nugget in the same Golden Triangle region of Victoria, which is made up of Bendigo, Ballarat and Wedderburn.
The find earned the amateur gold digger a whopping $200,000 after finding a rock that contained the metal.
The Goldfields region experienced a gold rush between 1851 and 1871 with the Australian population surging from 430,000 people to 1.7 million as people the world over arrived to find their riches.