Aussie woman's $7,000 find in outback: 'Not a bad day's work'
The 25-year-old made the discovery in the West Australian outback, and says finds like these are becoming rare.
An Australian woman armed with a metal detector came across a mighty chunk of gold worth more than $7,000 — something she says is becoming harder to find.
Tyler Mahoney, 25, who stars in the Discovery Channel show 'Gold Rush' and likes to refer to herself as a "professional gold digger", is a well-known fourth generation prospector living in Western Australia.
Recently she came across the two ounce nugget on her family mining tenement 20 minutes from Kalgoorlie — where a large number of Australian gold mines are located — and shared her glistening discovery on social media.
"There's $6,000 laying on the floor. Can anyone see it?" she cheekily remarked in the now viral TikTok. However since filming the video, the "nugget premium and gold price went up", meaning she sold it for more.
"I sold this nugget for $7,300 a month ago," she later said in the comments. "Gold prices are soaring at the moment. Not a bad day's work hey."
Currently, gold is valued at $2,936.19 AUD per ounce, according to Melbourne Gold Company.
How did she find it?
Contrary to what the light-hearted video suggests, the nugget wasn't just found conveniently lying on the ground, but rather in a "scrape and detect operation" that required a bit more work.
"We use an excavator or a loader to scrape back the ground. And we go deeper and deeper, and then we use the detector to detect the nuggets," she told Yahoo News Australia. "We found that one six foot under by that point."
Large nuggets becoming harder to find
Ms Mahoney recalled the biggest nugget she found being five ounces, while both her parents have found 12 ounce ones.
However as we approach 130 years into the Gold Rush at Kalgoorlie, bigger treasure troves like that are becoming harder to find.
"Mostly big ones are getting a lot rarer, we call it a bonus nugget," she said. "Ones like that we maybe find once a month... Sometimes if we're in a really good patch, we could be finding them every day. But in a worse off area, we might not find one for six months.
"It's hard getting access to ground that hasn't already been mined or prospected. Compared to like, 60 years ago, they were bloody lying everywhere."
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But that doesn't stop her from going out and trying, describing the hunt as addictive. "Finding a gold nugget is such an adrenaline rush," Ms Mahoney said. "It's like when you win the lottery or something and getting to do that every day is pretty cool.
"I grew up in the bush and I've done gold prospecting since I was a little girl, it's kind of all I've ever known."
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