General News
2 January, 2025
Dreams and faith: the golden find
By KEN ARNOLD Kevin and Bep Hillier and their four children were living on Cooglegong, a sheep and wheat farm near Albany when they decided to convert a bus so they could travel around Australia. As luck would have it the local grader driver had...
By KEN ARNOLD
Kevin and Bep Hillier and their four children were living on Cooglegong, a sheep and wheat farm near Albany when they decided to convert a bus so they could travel around Australia.
As luck would have it the local grader driver had a bus he would sell so 12 months were spent converting it before they made a dash up to Perth then off over the Nullabor Plains, towing their 1967 HR Holden on a trailer.
They eventually reached Cudgewa, near Corryong, where they stopped for three months before heading north to the Bundaberg area.
Although Kevin was working as an itinerant he managed to purchase a metal detector.
However it was not long before he suffered a work place injury.
Kevin and Bep decided to move to the caravan park at Bridgewater on Loddon so that he could go gold detecting.
He had only found a few small nuggets before his back problem worsened hence he had to have an operation.
On recovering Kevin and Bep would go detecting most days, they still only getting small nuggets.
On September 11, 1980 Kevin dreamt that he had found the holy grail. The next morning, without a word of his premonition, he dashed to nearby Inglewood to see Russell Castley. It was there that he described his dream they sketching the nugget.
On September 26 Kevin and Bep went detecting at Moliagal before moving on to Rheola where they hoped to find a large nugget as many had been unearthed there but they had no luck.
As they still had a couple hours to spare before they had to be back in Bridgewater they both tried their luck behind the old Kingower school site.
Bep recalls that she thought she heard a scream but took no notice for some time before there were more excited screams.
Fearing that Kevin had injured himself Bep rushed to him to find him kneeling by a hole, shaking like a leaf in a wind storm.
They both frantically dug around a gold nugget that did not seem to end.
Eventually they lifted the 27kg nugget out of the ground loaded it into their car and drove home slowly, in shock.
Without much fuss they carried the nugget into the motor home before hiding it in a baby bath under their bed.
Mum was the word for severals day until a gold dealer called the following Saturday at which time they christened the nugget The Hand of Faith owing to Bep’s devotion to religion.
The Hilliers were paid a deposit for their nugget, it being taken to Melbourne.
The Hilliers made a dash to Perth so that they would be out of the state when the then Premier of Victoria Dick (Sir Rupert) Hamer made the announcement of the discovery on television.
As this was some days later and as nobody knew the identity of the finder, Russell Castley, on seeing the news jumped out of his chair declaring somebody had found Kevin’s dream nugget.
On returning to Bridgewater the family packed up ready to make a hasty retreat but before the taxi could arrive, Evelyn, a resident at the park rushed down with a huge jar of 20 cent coins saying “I don’t know what your problem is but I want you to have these.”
Kevin purchased a new Toyota Landcruiser troupe carrier.
It was to be sometime before the Federal Government allowed the nugget to be sold to the Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas, for the equivalent of US$1,000,000.
The nugget was eventually placed in a locked revolving show case at the casino which is in the old part of Las Vegas, not too distant from the property where the Pawn Stars television show is filmed.
The Hillier family eventually moved to Stoneville near Mundaring before they visited Bep’s homeland The Netherlands.
Although the four children had grown up, the family next moved to Maiden Gully but when the siblings had gone their own ways Kevin and Bep purchased a property at Kingower.
A cairn with two plaques was unveiled on the site during 2010.
Kevin Hillier died on May 15, 2014.
Eventually Bep moved to Spring Gully, an outer suburb of Bendigo.
Incidentally the day I went to see the Hand of Faith nugget at the casino I found it shoved away in a corner of the building rather than being a feature show piece.
The nugget was the second largest nugget found in Australia during the 20th century.
Hand of Faith is largest found anywhere in the world using a metal detector.