General News
5 August, 2025
Gold monument restored
When Glenn Braybrook and Tim Brown recently visited Moliagul’s Welcome Stranger Monument, they felt its condition did not reflect what was once found there.
Mr Braybrook has fond recollections of visiting Victoria’s gold rush sites throughout his life.
“They are one of my favourite places I go to. I went to Moliagul years and years ago with my dad, and I noticed it was in bad repair then. But when they had the 150 year anniversary of the finding of the Welcome Stranger in 2019, I noticed even then it was really bad,” he said.
The site marks the place where the Welcome Stranger gold nugget was unearthed by John Deason and Richard Oates in February 1869.
The 72 kilogram finding would be worth nearly four million Australian dollars today.
“Tim had an ancestor who found the Poseidon nugget, another nugget found near Tarnagulla. I said to him, ‘lets go up there and see where these nuggets were found,” Mr Braybrook said.
Upon the pair’s observations, they noticed the site had minimal maintenence all over those years, and had fallen into disrepair.
“When we got to Moliagul I thought it was a disgrace. Other people there couldn’t even read what was on the monument,” Mr Braybrook said.
As a result, the pair decided to restore the site themselves.
The site is currently under a Victorian Heritage overlay, preventing excessive works from being undertaken, including repairs.
“It took about 12 months to get an exemption to do it. There seems to be a fine line between a restoration and maintenance,” Mr Braybrook said.
The letters on the accompanying signage had become disfigured, while the painted letters on the monument itself had eroded and faded away.
“Tim painted it and I used a traditional method, using a cuttle fish, believe it or not, done after you finish the inlay painting to get a more defined finish,” Mr Braybrook said.
“We also painted the fence. It hadn’t been touched since 1897. The whole thing, it hasn’t had any maintenence on it. It has even been vandalised over the years. Some of the fence has been bent and broken.
“We also had the road graded and the bitumen re-done, so it is easier to go out and have a look at it, and now you can read it. That is what we could legally do.”
Mr Braybrook said the project had received the praise of locals, tourists and prospectors in the area who frequent the site.
“The prospectors and minors association president even turned up one day and helped us too. Nobody realises how many people go to look at that thing out in Moliagul,” he said.
“It has been a bit of a fun journey, we have met a lot of people that have dropped in to talk to us while we are doing it. People have been fantastic.”
Mr Braybrook has already organised future site maintenence projects throughout Victoria’s goldfields to honour wherever masses of gold have been found.
“Tim and I are retired now, so we are going to go out and do this sort of stuff, get these places marked, get them acknowledged, and look after them,” he said.
“We intend to get places more worked on. There were some really large gold nuggets found in Maryborough, and we want to get them marked as near as possible to where they were found. We enjoy doing this sort of thing and other people like it too.
“There is that movement now to create a little tourist drive, so people can visit the sites where these nuggets were found. It may take us a little while, but it gives us something worthwhile to do.
“A lot of history can’t be forgotten there and it needs to be preserved. Without the gold rush, these little towns and cities wouldn’t exist. So to mark these significant nugget sites is an honour.”
