Mining gold in ancient buried rivers, known as deep lead mining, was a dangerous undertaking. But this search for a new life came at a high cost. ‘The Welcome Nugget was a sign that the opportunity to obtain a better life still existed’. ‘The discovery of what was the largest nugget in the world at the time, renewed interest in the Ballarat goldfield and sparked hope’, says Anna. The Welcome Nugget changed everything, as our Historian Anna Kyi explains. Once known as the ‘Queen of the Goldfields’, Ballarat’s gold production had started to decline during the late 1850s. So what made the discovery of the Welcome Nugget so special? In 1851, the discovery of gold by European settlers in Ballarat’s Poverty Point drew hundreds of thousands of gold seekers from around the world to Victoria in the hope of finding their fortune. Ballarat’s traditional owners, the Wadawurrung people, had known about the presence of gold in their Country for tens of thousands of years. But this wasn’t the first time that gold had been found in the area. The miners celebrated their discovery by baptising the nugget with beer from a nearby hotel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |