A young Australian gold digger has shared the moment she discovered a nugget worth at least $130,000 lying in red dirt.
Tyler Mahoney has been gold prospecting since she was a child and is surrounded by gold mines near her home – 20 minutes from Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.
Last weekend she discovered a 20-ounce gold nugget worth a staggering amount.
The fourth-generation gold prospector uploaded her find to TikTok on Monday.
‘There is $130,000 sitting on the floor right now. It is not my car, it’s worth about triple my car’s worth,’ she said.
‘Can you see it? This one blends in a little bit better.
‘Look at that. That is a true representation of Aussie gold. Massive, covered in red dirt and high purity.’
Ms Mahoney, who starred in the reality TV show Gold Rush, picked up the gold nugget to show how it filled the palm of her hand.
Last year, she found a nugget worth $35,000 armed only with a metal detector, and discovered many smaller ones worth less than $10,000.
While some of her TikTok followers were clearly jealous of her find, most were happy for her.
‘So do you get to keep that now and retire or what?’ one person wrote.
In September, Daily Mail Australia reported Ms Mahoney bought a ‘once in a lifetime find’ from a prospector who unearthed a nugget in Queensland’s central highlands.
The 22g Inca nugget, as it was known, was a hopper crystal – a crystal in a pyramid shape – in almost perfect condition.
Ms Mahoney said at the time it was about 92 per cent pure.
She told her followers most gold nuggets were rubbed smooth as they travelled through waterways, which made the 22g Inca nugget uniquely-shaped.
‘I’m holding one of the world’s rarest gold nuggets,’ Ms Mahoney told her 22,000 TikTok followers.
Tyler Mahoney showed off her gold nugget find to her TikTok followers
‘I will never ever hold anything like this again, and I’m a gold digger. I do this for a living.
‘When I saw a photo of this, my jaw dropped to the floor. This is insane, It is one of the rarest types of gold nuggets in the world. It’s called the Inca nugget.’
She previously told Yahoo that gold prospecting had ‘stood the test of time’ and there continued to be an appetite for Australian gold.
‘Gold is pretty much in every Australian state, but Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland are the three biggest producers,’ she said.
‘We’re pretty lucky that we’ve got gold pretty much everywhere and Australians, we are known for our big gold nuggets.’
The first Australian gold rush occurred in the 1890s, and gold is currently valued at more than $5,000 an ounce.
Ms Mahoney said it was still a good investment and advised anyone who found a large nugget to ‘hold on to them as long as possible’.
