The Lost Gold Reef in The Otways: Wangerrip
Hidden deep within southern Australia lies one of the most unusual gold discoveries ever recorded. Known as the Wangerrip gold reef, this lost deposit appears on official geological maps as a major occurrence, yet it has no recorded production, no defined ore body, and no confirmed modern location. Discovered briefly in the late nineteenth century and then lost to time, the Wangerrip Reef stands as a geological anomaly that challenges everything we think we know about how and where gold forms in Australia. Hosted in rocks hundreds of millions of years younger than Victoria’s famous goldfields, this rare gold vein formed through a completely different tectonic process during the breakup of Gondwana, making it one of the strangest and rarest gold occurrences in the state.
