In May 2015, David Hole, a resident of Maryborough, Victoria, found the heavy and mysterious looking rock resting in yellow clay, around 2km out of Maryborough, while prospecting with a metal detector for gold. In 2018, still curious, Mr Hole brought this 38.5cm x 14.5cm x 14.5cm rock to Museums Victoria for identification.
Museums Victoria geologists Bill Birch and Dermot Henry suspected almost immediately that this was a meteorite. While suspected meteorites are often brought by the public to the museum, almost all of them are , in museum parlance,
"meteor-wrongs". Following photography, moulding and weighing, analysis on a slice removed for research purposes confirmed that this humble-looking "rock" is an
H5 ordinary chondrite meteorite. The term Chondrite means that this meteorite contains tiny crystallised droplets (chondrules), that formed by flash heating of the dust clouds of the early solar system. It was most likely formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Bill Birch, Museums Victoria Emeritus Curator in Geosciences, who lead-authored the scientific paper identifying and describing the Maryborough Meteorite (published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria) muses, "When you consider all the events this chunk of rock has experienced since its formation 4.6 billion years ago, it's really mind-boggling that we get the opportunity to hold it and study it today. How good is that?"
The last meteorite found in Victoria was discovered at Willow Grove, Gippsland, in 1995. It is an iron-nickel meteorite, and is named, as are all meteorites, for the location where it was discovered. The most recent Victorian meteorite to be
formally described is Ballarat, which was found in the late 1860s, but not confirmed as a meteorite until 2002. It is regarded as a 'fossil' meteorite, because it was found in river gravels buried under basalt, where it had been carried after landing. That meteorite is currently on display in the
Dynamic Earth exhibition at Melbourne Museum.
