Once known as the ‘Queen of the Goldfields’, Ballarat’s gold production had started to decline during the late 1850s. The Welcome Nugget changed everything, as our Historian Anna Kyi explains. ‘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. So what made the discovery of the Welcome Nugget so special? But this wasn’t the first time that gold had been found in the area. Ballarat’s traditional owners, the Wadawurrung people, had known about the presence of gold in their Country for tens of thousands of years. 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. The miners celebrated their discovery by baptising the nugget with beer from a nearby hotel. Replica of the Welcome Nugget held in the Sovereign Hill Museums Association collection To this day, it remains the second-largest gold nugget found in Australia. The Welcome Nugget weighed a whopping 69 kilograms and was just over 99% pure gold. A party of 22 Cornish miners discovered what was then the world’s largest gold nugget. On the evening of 9 June, 1858 an excited shout rang out from Ballarat's Red Hill Mine.
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