Prospector finds 2.7kg gold nugget in Australia

SYDNEY: A prospector in Australia found a gold nugget weighing 2.7 kilogrammes, a Melbourne-based newspaper reported Tuesday.
Mick Brown was scanning an area in Wedderburn, Victoria with a metal detector when he made the find several weeks ago, The Age said.
He dubbed it "Fair Dinkum." The nugget is estimated to be worth Aus$135,000 (US$103,400).
Brown told the newspaper he thought he was facing a "big molten blob of copper" when his metal detector went off.
But a few centimetres below the surface parts of the nugget were visible.
"I thought bugger me, it is, it's bloody gold," Brown was quoted as saying in the report.
He said hoped to sell the nugget to a private collector, pay off his debt and spend money on his wife and children.
Wedderburn is located in Victoria's the so-called golden triangle, the centre of a gold rush in the mid-1800s.
The area is popular with amateur prospectors and several have found large nuggets.
In 1981, a man found a nugget weighing a record 8 kilogrammes at Wedderburn.
The nugget dubbed the Pride of Australia was stolen from a Melbourne museum a decade later and never recovered. – dpa