Welcome Stranger



The Welcome Stranger is an alluvial gold nugget which is the biggest ever discovered, and was unearthed by Cornish miners John Deason and Richard Oates on 5February 1869, 9 miles north-west of Dunolly, Australia.

Discovery
Found only 3 cm below the surface, near the base of a tree on a slope leading to what was then known as Bulldog Gully, the nugget had a gross weight of 3523.5 ozt (241 lb 10 oz). Its trimmed weight was 2520 ozt (210 lbs), and its net weight was 2315.5 ozt (192 lbs 11.5 oz).

At the time of the discovery, there were no scales capable of weighing a nugget this large, so it was broken into three pieces on an anvil by Dunolly-based blacksmith Archibald Walls.

Deason, Oates, and a few friends took the nugget to the London Chartered Bank of Australia, in Dunolly, which advanced them £9,000. Deason and Oates were finally paid an estimated £9,381 for their nugget, which became known as the "Welcome Stranger". At August 2019 gold prices, it would be worth US$3.4 million [2.3 million GBP]. It was heavier than the "Welcome Nugget" of 2217 ozt that had been found in Ballarat in 1858. The goldfields warden F. K. Orme reported that 2269 ozt of smelted gold had been obtained from it, irrespective of scraps that were given away by the finders, estimated as totalling another 47 ozt. The nugget was soon melted down and the gold was sent as ingots to Melbourne for forwarding to the Bank of England. It left the country on board the steamship Reigate which departed on 21 February.

An obelisk commemorating the discovery of the "Welcome Stranger" was erected near the spot in 1897. A replica of the "Welcome Stranger" is in the Old Treasury building, Treasury Place, Melbourne, Victoria; another replica is owned by descendants of John Deason and is now on display at the Dunolly Rural Transaction Center.



Discoverers
John Deason was born in 1829 on the island of Tresco, Isles of Scilly, 45 km off the southwestern tip of Cornwall, England, UK. In 1851, he was a tin dresser before becoming a gold miner. Deason continued with gold mining and workings most of his life and, although he became a store keeper at Moliagul, he lost a substantial proportion of his wealth through poor investments in gold mining. He bought a small farm near Moliagul where he lived until he died in 1915, aged 85 years.

Richard Oates was born about 1827 at Pendeen in Cornwall. After the 1869 find, Oates returned to the UK and married. He returned to Australia with his wife and they had four children. The Oates family, in 1895, purchased 800 acre of land at Marong, Victoria, about 15 mi west of Bendigo, Victoria, which Oates farmed until his death in Marong in 1906, aged 79 years.

Descendants of the two discoverers gathered to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the discovery of the nugget.