AN Australian man stumbled across a bit of buried treasure while walking around a familiar spot.

    Mick Brown, 42, said he decided to leave his house with his metal detector after his wife told him to get some air. Brown gave up smoking a few weeks ago, and his wife told him to leave the house temporarily because he was getting grumpy.

    Brown walked near Wedderburn, Victoria, a place where he has prospected in the past. As he moved the detector around the area, the machine started to screech loudly.

    At first, Brown thought he had found a “big molten blob of copper.”

    Instead, lying about six inches (15.2 cm) below the surface was a massive piece of gold.

    “I thought, ‘Bugger me, it is, it’s bloody gold!’” Brown said. “I just dug it up, 87 ounces (2.46 kg) of the good stuff.”

    In 2013, a different Australian man found a 12-pound (5.4-kg) gold nugget in Ballarat. The 12-pound nugget was estimated to be worth about US$500,000.

    Brown said he was inspired by the nugget’s appearance when he named the large piece of precious metal. “It took a while to name it, but everyone that looked at it was like ‘fair dinkum,’ you know, so that’s what we called it, the fair dinkum nugget.”

    While some estimate the nugget to sell for about US$100,000, Brown said he thinks it is worth over US$200,000.

    Brown, a seasoned prospector, said he thinks the nugget might be worth more than the US$141,000 estimation price because it has “good grooves and moves.”

    “Sometimes they do say gold is worth twice its weight in gold if it’s a really nice looking nugget,” he said.

    After he finally sells the piece, Brown said he plans to take his wife and daughters to a special dinner, pay off his tax debt and buy his children a spa bath.(SD-Agencies)