Platinum Nuggets in Australia: Fifield

Australia's Rare Platinum Deposit

Platinum is one of those metals that feels almost mythical in its rarity. You don’t normally stumble across it in a riverbed or dig it up with a shovel the way you might with gold. It’s the kind of metal that usually hides deep underground, locked inside ancient magmas, only to be mined by billion-dollar operations in places like South Africa or Russia.

If you were to melt down every ounce of platinum humanity has ever mined, it would barely fill a single living room. That’s how rare it is. So, the idea of panning platinum out of a creek sounds almost absurd. And yet, that’s exactly what happened in the Australian bush — in a quiet place called Fifield, out in the dry plains of central New South Wales.

A Most Unlikely Discovery

Picture it: the 1890s. The gold rushes had come and gone, but the fever for precious metal still burned hot across the colonies. Prospectors wandered the countryside with shovels and pans, always hoping lightning would strike twice.

Near a tiny settlement called Fifield, a few of those old-timers were working the river gravels. Gold was there, but it was fine and patchy. Then, in among their pans, they began to notice something strange — small, silvery grains that refused to tarnish. They didn’t dissolve in acid, they didn’t rust, and they were heavier than gold.

Some tossed them aside, assuming they were lead shot or some odd contamination. But others kept them, curious. Eventually, word reached Sydney that these mysterious specks had been assayed — and the result made jaws drop. The metal was platinum.

In an instant, Fifield became the only place in Australia — and one of the few on Earth — where platinum could be washed from a pan. It was one of the rarest metals known to science, and it was just sitting there in the gravels, waiting to be found.

Why Platinum? Why Here?

To understand why platinum turned up in a creek in the middle of New South Wales, you have to go back about 440 million years, to a time when the region looked very different.

Back then, what’s now inland Australia was a chaotic patchwork of volcanic arcs and deep ocean basins. Molten rock surged upward from Earth’s mantle, intruding into the crust in great pulses. One of those intrusions cooled into what geologists now call the Owendale and Tout Complexes — massive bodies of dark, iron-rich rock known as ultramafic intrusions.

“Ultramafic” simply means the rock was born from magma that was low in silica but rich in magnesium and iron — the kind of melt that also loves to carry nickel, chromium, and platinum group elements. When that magma began to cool and crystallize, different minerals started separating out like ingredients in a slowly freezing soup.

Early in that cooling process, platinum — being dense and metallic — linked up with iron to form an alloy called isoferroplatinum. Tiny blebs and grains of this alloy crystallized out of the molten rock, often alongside chromite, a dark mineral rich in chromium. Under a microscope, you can still see microscopic crystals of chromite trapped inside some of the platinum grains from Fifield — geological fingerprints of their fiery birth.

In simpler terms: the platinum formed deep underground, in magma, as solid metallic specks that cooled out of the melt and got locked into the rock.

From Magma to Mud

Of course, that’s only the beginning of the story. Because platinum might have formed down there — but Fifield’s prospectors found it up here, in the riverbeds. So, how does a deep magmatic metal make its way to the surface as a nugget you can pan?

The answer is time, water, and Australia’s brutal climate.

Over hundreds of millions of years, those ultramafic intrusions — once deep below the surface — were slowly uplifted, fractured, and exposed to the atmosphere. Rainwater, oxygen, and microbial action went to work. The minerals within began to weather, and the once-solid rock turned into a patchwork of clays, oxides, and rust-colored laterite.

This kind of deep weathering produces what’s called a lateritic profile — a thick, iron-rich soil that forms when tropical or subtropical weather eats away at the parent rock. And laterites are sneaky things: as they form, they can concentrate certain metals that don’t easily dissolve. Nickel, cobalt, and — as it turns out — platinum can all become enriched near the surface.

Some of the platinum stayed behind as microscopic grains in that laterite. Some was mobilized in groundwater, forming tiny nanoparticles or coating existing grains with fresh layers of secondary platinum. And some — over long ages of erosion — was washed away entirely, carried downstream into the creeks.

There, in slow-moving channels, those heavy grains settled out with other dense materials — magnetite, chromite, and, of course, gold. Over millions of years, the rivers themselves shifted and dried up, leaving behind ancient, buried channels — the so-called “deep leads” that later miners would rediscover.

So, the platinum’s journey went something like this:
born in magma → locked in rock → freed by weathering → carried by water → buried in river gravels.

The Platinum Rush

When word got out in the 1890s, it didn’t take long for miners to swarm the Fifield area. Unlike the goldfields of Victoria or the massive quartz reefs of Kalgoorlie, the platinum here wasn’t deep — it was right there in the ancient gravels.

Three main channels — the Gillenbine, Fifield, and Platina Leads — became the focus of mining. The gravels were shallow enough in places to dig by hand, though some extended twenty meters or more below the surface.

The process was classic 19th-century placer mining. Teams of men dug up the ancient gravels, hauled them to the surface, and “puddled” them — using water and agitation to break apart clays and let the heavy metals sink. The residue went through sluice boxes, and the concentrates were hand-panned to separate gold and platinum.

Platinum, being even denser than gold, often settled in the very bottom riffles — and because it doesn’t amalgamate easily with mercury (unlike gold), many early miners actually lost a fair amount of it, thinking it was useless waste.

But even with primitive technology, the field produced a remarkable yield. Between the 1890s and early 1900s, about 650 kilograms of platinum were recovered — roughly 20,000 ounces — along with smaller amounts of gold. It made Fifield one of the most significant platinum producers outside Russia and South Africa at the time.

Of course, the boom didn’t last forever. Once the easily worked leads were exhausted and the deeper gravels became uneconomical to reach, the field went quiet. For much of the 20th century, Fifield’s platinum was little more than a geological curiosity — a dusty footnote in the story of Australian mining.

The Science Catches Up

Decades later, as geologists returned to re-study the old platinum field, they began to realize that what had happened at Fifield wasn’t just a fluke — it was a natural laboratory.

Modern microscopes revealed that those “nuggets” the old prospectors found weren’t pure chunks of metal at all, but complex alloys. Most were made of platinum-iron, sprinkled with tiny inclusions of osmium, iridium, ruthenium, and even rare minerals like laurite and bowieite.

Some had delicate exsolution textures — microscopic lamellae showing that different metals had separated from one another as the grain cooled. Others had chromite inclusions, confirming they’d crystallized inside dunite or chromitite layers deep in the intrusion.

But the real revelation came when scientists examined the outer surfaces of the nuggets. Under electron microscopes, they saw weathering pits, grooves, and nanoparticle coatings — all evidence that platinum, once thought to be completely inert, could actually move in the environment.

It turns out that platinum can dissolve and re-precipitate in natural waters, forming nanocrystals that can migrate through soils and later stick to other grains. This explained how platinum managed to spread so widely in the Fifield region — not just in chunks, but as a fine dust, coating iron oxides and traveling far from its original source.

In other words, the Fifield field showed geologists that platinum isn’t as immovable as we thought. It has its own slow, quiet mobility — one that can carry it far from the magmatic bodies that birthed it.

The Modern Chapter: Sunrise

Fast forward to the present day, and Fifield’s story has evolved again — this time with the language of modern mining: feasibility studies, resource estimates, and battery-metal demand.

Just northwest of the old workings lies the Sunrise Project, a vast lateritic deposit sitting above the same ancient ultramafic complexes that once fed the creeks with platinum. The company Sunrise Energy Metals (formerly Clean TeQ) has spent years drilling, mapping, and analyzing this laterite, finding not just platinum, but also high concentrations of nickel, cobalt, and scandium — all crucial for electric vehicle batteries.

The numbers are staggering: around 103 million tonnes of laterite averaging 0.33 grams of platinum per tonne — that’s about 1.08 million ounces of platinum sitting quietly in the weathered rock. Platinum isn’t the main game here — it’s a valuable bonus, a by-product of nickel and cobalt processing — but it’s still one of the largest defined platinum resources in Australia.

For now, the project remains in the development phase, waiting on financing and market conditions. The economics hinge more on the battery metals than on the platinum. But if it goes ahead, platinum would once again be flowing — this time not from a prospector’s pan, but from a modern processing plant designed to leach, extract, and refine it with surgical precision.

The Spark in the Pan

If you visit Fifield today, it’s hard to imagine the excitement that once rippled through the place. The paddocks are quiet, the old workings mostly reclaimed by grass. But if you walk along the creeks after a good rain and look closely, you might still find what those first prospectors saw — a tiny, silvery glint at the bottom of a pan.

Here's the video we made on this on the OzGeology YouTube Channel: