The Big Gold Nugget

Seven thousand people. The town today has a population in the low hundreds. That collapse is the story the nugget stands for, and it is the most extreme depopulation figure in this catalogue.

Croydon's surviving nineteenth-century buildings – courthouse, police station, store, and the Club Hotel – are why the heritage claim holds. When a rush ends and nothing replaces it, the buildings stay because there is no pressure to redevelop them, which is the same accident that preserved Chiltern in Victoria.

A nugget is the right object for a rush town, and a rarer choice than it looks. Most gold-era monuments in this catalogue depict the work – the Kelso panner, the Chiltern shovel, the Grenfell pick and pan, the Rubyvale miner. A nugget depicts the outcome: the thing everybody came for, most of them never found, and a handful did.

The town's entry sign also carries the two-metre Big Gilbert's Dragon, built in 2015 to represent a reptile found in the region – so Croydon has two objects, one about what was taken out of the ground and one about what still lives on it.

The nugget's maker, size and date are not recorded.