Cleaning gold nuggets

You’ve found some nuggets with your metal detector. You finally retrieve them from the ground. You can see they’re gold, but they don’t look very shiny! They’re covered in clay, mud, soil, perhaps with bits of quartz still sticking to them. Maybe it’s even covered in ironstone, the famed ‘black gold’! How do you go about cleaning gold nuggets to make them look as good and shiny as they can?

Continue reading

The Ring River Goldfield

The Rosebery – Zeehan – Dundas area is renowned mainly for its silver-lead, zinc and tin deposits. However, some decent finds of gold were also made. The main gold workings in this part of the west coast were in the Ring River area and Melba Flats. Both of these produced some sizeable nuggets in their day. The Ring River goldfield was home to one of Tasmania’s gold rushes, in 1891.

Continue reading

The Corinna Goldfields

Gold was known in the northwest of Tasmania since at least James (Philosopher) Smith’s discovery in the Forth Valley near the modern-day Lake Cethana dam. None of the workings were on a large scale. It wasn’t until Harry Middleton’s discovery in Corinna in 1879 that the gold rush to the Pieman kicked off. It would eventually lead to the largest gold nugget ever found in Tasmania. Much of the area is still accessible to gold fossickers today.

Continue reading