Depending on who you ask, Tasmania is renowned (infamous?) as a place where gold nuggets are either too small to bother searching for, or absent altogether. A while ago I wrote a blog post about the goldfields of northeastern Tasmania, and mentioned that most of them had produced nuggets heavier than one ounce. I think that Tasmania’s reputation as a place where nuggets don’t occur is undeserved, and I had trouble finding a good comprehensive resource for prospectors, so I decided to start putting together a database of historical Tasmanian gold nuggets.
Most of the original data in the database was found by searching the National Library of Australia’s Trove database of scanned newspapers. This is also a fantastic resource to research places to go prospecting for gold.
Ralph Bottrill’s Alluvial Gold in Tasmania booklet contains a list of nuggets that includes some modern finds as well, and is overall a very useful resource if you’re interested in prospecting for alluvial gold.