In Australia, local and global treasure hunters get gold fever as prices skyrocket

In the hinterlands of Australia’s historic goldfields, Vicki Plumridge jumps for joy when she digs a small golden nugget out of the earth. The retired retail worker was ‌learning how to use her new metal detector when it started bleeping by the moss-covered ruins of a building. After Plumridge dug the nugget out of the shallow dirt with a plastic trowel, ‍a guide estimated it was around 0.2 of a gram of gold, worth about A$40 (US$26.58). “But to me, it’s worth a million dollars,” said the...