The Gold Hunter Who Found Something Far More Cosmic
Imagine holding onto a rock for years, convinced that you’ve got a gold nugget trapped inside it—only to learn later that it’s actually something far older and far more extraordinary. That’s exactly what happened to David Hole, a prospector exploring Maryborough Regional Park back in 2015. Armed with his metal detector and the hope of stumbling across hidden treasure, he uncovered a heavy, reddish rock buried in yellow clay. Given the area’s rich gold-mining history, it made perfect sense for him to assume he’d hit the jackpot.
But this rock refused to give up its secrets easily. Hole took it home and tried everything—rock saws, drills, acid baths, even a sledgehammer. Nothing made so much as a crack. The stubbornness of the rock just made him more convinced that gold was locked inside. Years went by as he kept testing different ways to break it open, certain that one day it would finally split apart and reveal its prize.
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Eventually, curiosity and frustration pushed him to bring the rock to the Melbourne Museum. And that’s where things got interesting. Geologists Dermot Henry and Bill Birch had seen thousands of rocks brought in by hopeful treasure hunters. Almost all of them turned out to be ordinary Earth rocks. But this time, the moment they examined Hole’s find, something felt different.
The rock was unusually heavy. Its surface had a sculpted, dimpled texture, the kind that forms when an object melts while hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere. Once a small slice was cut from it using a diamond saw, the truth came into focus: it wasn’t a gold-filled rock at all. It was a meteorite—an incredibly rare H5 ordinary chondrite, packed with iron and dotted with ancient chondrules, tiny mineral droplets formed in the earliest days of the Solar System.
Scientists determined that this meteorite was around 4.6 billion years old, meaning it had been formed before Earth itself fully took shape. It likely originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, eventually getting knocked loose and sent on a fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dating suggests it had been sitting in the region for somewhere between 100 and 1,000 years before Hole found it.
And here’s the ironic twist: in Victoria, thousands of gold nuggets have been discovered over the years—but only 17 meteorites have ever been officially recorded. Hole hadn’t found gold. He’d found something far rarer, far older, and far more scientifically valuable.
It’s a reminder that sometimes the greatest treasures aren’t the ones we expect. And who knows? There might be another “impossible-to-break” rock sitting in someone’s backyard right now, hiding a story written in stardust.
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