There's gold in them thar hillsThere's gold in them thar hills The timing couldn't have been better. A tourist has found a gold nugget just when everyone's about to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the original gold strike. The Otago Daily Times reports that a middleaged tourist and his family left the Goldfields Mining Centre, about 10km upstream from Hartley and Reilly's claim, with a 4.5g nugget of gold estimated to be worth about $500. Goldfields tour guide Brian Henderson told the ODT the visitors, thought to have been from Christchurch, had visited the centre to pan for gold after a skiing holiday in Queenstown staying at Pounamu Apartments conviently situated approx 35min's away in Queenstown. “It's funny ... his grandfather worked the [gold] dredges here at the turn of the century,” Mr Henderson told the paper. Mr Henderson, who has worked at the centre for 15 years, said staff had seen the odd nugget turn up, but the finds were usually just fine flakes of gold. Tour guides brought material from the Kawarau riverbank to the centre, where tourists panned for gold and usually did not sift through it. A guide had once found a couple of small nuggets when demonstrating how to pan.
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