Welcome Stranger, Gold nugget in Moliagul, Australia

The Welcome Stranger was an alluvial gold nugget found at Moliagul, Victoria, with a gross weight of 109.59 kg and a trimmed weight of 78 kg. The monument at the site is a tapering four-sided cairn of small white and cream stones on a concrete base, topped by a rust-brown metal anvil. Its front plaque records that the nugget was cut up on this anvil on 9 February 1869, and a circular recess below holds crossed metal tools.

John Deason and Richard Oates, Cornish miners, found the nugget on 5 February 1869 only 3 cm below the surface near Bulldog Gully at Moliagul. It weighed 109.59 kg gross; no scales could weigh it, so blacksmith Archibald Walls broke it into three pieces on an anvil. The gold was melted into ingots and shipped on the Reigate on 21 February. An obelisk was erected near the spot in 1897.

The find gave the name "Welcome Stranger" to the nugget, and the 1897 obelisk near the site was joined in 1968 by a stone monument topped with an anvil, erected by John A. Flynn. Descendants of Deason and Oates gathered at Moliagul for the 150th anniversary in 2019.

The monument stands at the Moliagul discovery site, about 14 km north-west of Dunolly; the plaque records the cutting on 9 February 1869 and its erection by John A. Flynn in January 1968. A replica nugget is displayed at the Dunolly Rural Transaction Centre, and another at the Old Treasury building in Melbourne. The site is open ground beside a building with white posts.

The anvil on the monument is not the original: Dunolly blacksmith Archibald Walls broke the nugget into three pieces on his own anvil so it could be weighed. The stone obelisk itself was erected in 1897, and the plaque credits John A. Flynn for the 1968 memorial work.