Gold Deposits in Tasmania: Fields, Rules and Licence Fee

Gold in Tasmania sits in three settings: old quartz reefs and alluvial gravels in the north-east (Beaconsfield, Mathinna, Lisle), copper-gold ground on the West Coast (Mount Lyell and Henty), and creek gravels shed from both. To search for it by hand outside the 11 declared fossicking areas you need a Prospecting Licence from Mineral Resources Tasmania (MRT), which costs A$39.20 in 2026-27 (20 fee units at A$1.96 each, per the Mineral Resources Regulations 2016 and Tasmanian Treasury). This page lists the main goldfields, who mines gold today, the licence rules, and how to check the ground on MRT’s maps before you dig.

Where is gold found in Tasmania

Three regions hold the best-known gold occurrences. North-east Tasmania holds the reef and alluvial fields around Beaconsfield, Mathinna and Lisle. The West Coast sits on the Mount Read Volcanic Belt, which hosts the Mount Lyell, Rosebery and Henty deposits (Henty Gold Mine overview). The creeks and rivers draining both areas carry placer gold, meaning gold grains that erosion has moved out of the rock and left in gravel.

Two terms matter for what follows. A reef or lode is a gold-bearing quartz vein in solid rock, mined underground. Alluvial gold is loose gold in stream gravel, which hand tools can work. Hard-rock gold needs a mining lease and heavy equipment; alluvial gold is the part a licensed hobbyist can work by hand with a pan.

Tasmanian gold fields at a glance

The table sets out the best-known fields, what kind of gold each had, and what the sources record. Figures are historical unless stated, and old production records are incomplete for alluvial ground.

Chart

Tasmanian gold figures on one scale

Tonnes of gold, converted from ounces at 31.1035 g per ounce; each bar measures something different

Gold mining in Tasmania today

Henty is an underground gold mine near Queenstown on the West Coast. In September 2026 its operator, Kaiser Reef, reported an updated resource of 4.23 million tonnes at an average 3.16 grams per tonne (g/t) for 429,000 ounces, and a new ore reserve of 1.91 million tonnes at 3.22 g/t for 198,000 ounces (Kaiser Reef ASX announcement, 7 September 2026). A resource is the mineralised rock the company has measured; a reserve is the part it can mine at a profit. The same report says 25,800 ounces were mined in the 12 months to the end of June 2026, and the company is targeting 30,000 ounces a year. The estimates use a 1.5 g/t cut-off grade (the lowest grade worth mining) and a gold price assumption of A$4,000 per ounce.

Chart

Henty grade against its cut-off

Grams of gold per tonne, September 2026 estimates

The chart below puts these figures on one scale in tonnes. They measure different things: a life-of-mine total, a pre-1914 total, a current resource and reserve, and one year of output. The point is the scale, not a ranking.

The rock belts that hold the gold

Tasmania’s gold follows its geology. The north-east fields around Beaconsfield, Mathinna and Lisle include both reef and alluvial gold. The West Coast gold belongs to the Mount Read Volcanic Belt, a long strip of volcanic rock that also hosts the Hellyer, Que River, Rosebery, Hercules and Mount Lyell base-metal deposits; at Henty the gold sits in structurally complex zones next to the Henty Fault (Henty Gold Mine).

MRT publishes the state geology at 1:500,000 scale as an open dataset, derived from its 1:250,000 digital geology, which lets you see which rock belts a block of ground falls on (1:500,000 Geology Data and Map, data.gov.au). Matching a creek to the rock units upstream is the first filter for deciding where alluvial gold could have come from.

Silver and other metals found with Tasmanian gold

Silver and gold travel together in the West Coast ores. Mount Lyell’s life-of-mine output of 750 tonnes of silver against 45 tonnes of gold shows the ratio in a large copper system. If you are weighing a block of ground for silver, read the tenement and geology layers described below in the same way.

Chart

Mount Lyell metal output: gold against silver

Tonnes produced over the mine’s life

Gold prospecting in Tasmania: licence rules and fees

The rule is simple to state and easy to get wrong. A Prospecting Licence is needed to search for minerals anywhere on the island outside a declared fossicking area. The licence lasts up to five years, and you choose the term (Prospecting Licence, Australian Business Licence and Information Service).

1. Decide where you will search. Check the land type first (see the map section below). The licence does not give you the right to enter private land, a mineral tenement or reserved land.
2. Pick a term. A licence runs for up to five years. The 2026-27 fee is A$39.20, which is 20 fee units at A$1.96 a unit (Tasmanian Treasury; Mineral Resources Regulations 2016). Fee units are reset each July, so check the current fee with Mineral Resources Tasmania before you pay.
3. Apply with form MRDA P1. ABLIS lists the application form and MRT’s enquiries line, (03) 6165 4800 (Mineral Resources Tasmania, 30 Gordons Hill Road, Rosny Park).
4. Get permission to enter. For private land you need the landowner’s consent. To work inside a mining lease or exploration licence you need the tenement holder’s consent, on MRT’s Approval to Prospect form.
5. Carry the conditions with you. MRT’s conditions sheet for Prospecting Licences sets the equipment and depth limits summarised below.

A Group Prospecting Licence for clubs, schools and businesses is 140 fee units, or A$274.40 at the 2026-27 unit value. The holder must obtain land-manager permission and report activity.

What the licence lets you do

The licence covers collecting rock, mineral, water or soil samples by hand, mapping the licence area, and using hand-held instruments for geological measurements. It does not cover mechanical machinery, explosives, sluices, trommels or motorised pumps (ABLIS). Confirm any equipment not on the plain list, such as a small hand-held sluice, with MRT before you take it into the field.

Use the calculator to see what a licence and a season of trips cost, and how much gold you would need to recover to cover them.

Tasmania fossicking areas where no licence is needed

Eleven areas are declared fossicking areas under section 116 of the Mineral Resources Development Act 1995 (Mineral Resources Development (Fossicking Areas) Order 1996). Anyone can fossick in them without a licence, within set conditions. The Order names them: Coal Hill, Colebrook Hill, Gladstone, Killiecrankie, Lord Brassey, Lune River, Magnet, Penguin, Tunnel Marsh, Weld River and Weymouth (Order 1996, Schedule 1).

• Coal Hill lies in State forest near Hastings; Colebrook Hill is near Rosebery on the West Coast; Gladstone is in the north-east; Lune River is in the far south; Penguin is on the north-west coast; Tunnel Marsh is near Lake Echo (Order 1996, Schedule 1); Killiecrankie Bay is on Flinders Island in Bass Strait.
• The Act defines fossicking as searching for minerals, other than for commercial gain, to a depth of 2 metres by digging by hand or using hand-held instruments (Mineral Resources Development Act 1995, section 3). Check MRT’s current conditions for each area before you go.
• Each area has its own conditions on MRT’s website, including what equipment is allowed. Read them before you take a metal detector or any tool beyond a pan and hand tools.

The declared areas were set aside mainly for gem and mineral collectors, and each has its own notes on MRT’s site about what can be found. Anyone planning to detect or pan for gold should treat them as a place to learn, and plan the main trip on licensed ground.

Check the ground on Mineral Resources Tasmania maps

MRT runs three map viewers: a general viewer with layers for exploration licences, boreholes, mineral occurrences and samples, a prospecting viewer, and a fossicking viewer. The fossicking map is published as a public service of the eleven areas (MRT Fossicking Areas service). The Prospecting Access viewer lets you zoom to a location and tap the map to see whether prospecting is allowed, not allowed or needs permission there. It is backed by a public map service that gathers the datasets relevant to prospecting (MRT Prospecting Access service).

A sensible order of checks before any trip:

• Open the Prospecting Access viewer at the exact spot and note whether prospecting is allowed.
• Look at the tenement layer. A mining lease or exploration licence over the spot means you need the holder’s consent.
• Check land tenure. National parks, nature reserves and conservation areas are reserved land with separate rules.
• Look at mineral occurrences and old workings in the general viewer to see where gold has been recorded.
• Call MRT if the map and the ground disagree.

For a wider view of how mining titles are published by other jurisdictions, see our guide to Australian gold deposits by state.

Safety, permission and penalties

Prospecting outside the declared fossicking areas without a licence is an offence under the Mineral Resources Development Act 1995. National parks and other reserved land are managed by Parks and Wildlife under separate rules, so a Prospecting Licence is not a permit to dig there. Check current penalties and any reserved-land rules with Mineral Resources Tasmania.

• Permission: licence plus landowner or tenement-holder consent, every time.
• Old workings: historic shafts and adits are common in goldfield country. Stay out of them and keep clear of collars and fenced ground. For underground hazards in general, see our mining safety systems guide.
• No mercury: never use it to recover gold; it poisons water and people.
• Waterways: do not undermine stream banks, and restore diggings before you leave.
• Tell someone: West Coast and north-east forest tracks have patchy mobile coverage.

The United States has its own patchwork of land rules for panning; our California panning rules by land type shows how the same logic of licence plus land consent applies there.

▶ Why owning a claim or licence is not the same as owning the land, and why you still need access permission. · 3:19

Screening ground before you walk it

For a consultant or licence holder, the cheapest step is the one before the trip. Overlay the MRT tenement and occurrence layers on recent Sentinel-2 imagery to find tracks, cleared ground and old workings, and look for iron-stained or clay-altered ground that can mark mineralised rock. Satellite imagery gives exploration targets, not a resource estimate. If you want that done on your own boundary, Farmonaut’s satellite mineral detection takes a KML or polygon and returns mapped signals, and you can send a boundary through the mining query form or contact us with questions.

▶ How satellites help find gold: what remote sensing can and cannot show. · 4:25

How alluvial gold collects in Tasmanian creeks

Gold is about 19 times denser than water, so a flowing creek sorts it out of the gravel. Grains drop where the current slows: on the inside of bends, behind boulders, in cracks in bedrock and under tree roots. That is why a prospector with a pan looks first at bedrock crevices and the base of gravel layers rather than the middle of a bar.

In Tasmania the sources of the gold are the quartz veins of the north-east and the altered volcanic rocks of the West Coast. Streams that cut through those belts are the logical places to test. The Lisle alluvial field, where gold was found in 1879, is a reminder that creek gold can sit well away from the reef that shed it.

Choosing a field: what each type of ground asks of you

• Old reef fields such as Beaconsfield and Mathinna. The best ground is in mining leases or heritage sites, and the surface is often riddled with old workings. Treat these as places to read history, not to dig, unless the tenement holder agrees in writing.
• Alluvial districts such as Lisle. Much of the ground is now timber country, so check State forest access and any harvesting closures on the day you go.
• West Coast belts around Queenstown and Rosebery. These carry active and historic mining titles. The tenement layer in the MRT viewer decides most of your options here.
• Declared fossicking areas. No licence, but hand tools only and no detectors. Good for learning to pan and to read gravel.

Costs beyond the licence

The licence is the smallest cost. Travel, fuel for forest tracks, a gold pan, a classifier sieve, a pick, a shovel and a metal detector (if you choose to use one on licensed ground) come to far more than the licence fee. Set your own numbers in the calculator and compare the break-even gold weight with what the records say a creek is likely to give. Past production totals were recovered by many men working large areas over years, so they are a poor guide to a weekend’s yield.

Reading old records before you go

MRT holds historical geological reports for the north-east goldfields and the West Coast, and its map layers show recorded mineral occurrences and old workings. Compare three things for any spot: whether gold was recorded, whether the ground is open under the Prospecting Access layer, and whether a tenement now covers it. Where all three line up, the site is worth a visit; where a tenement covers it, send a written request to the holder before you go. Keep notes of where you sampled, the date, and the equipment you used, in case MRT or a land manager asks for them.

Frequently asked questions

Where is gold found in Tasmania?

The main historic fields are Beaconsfield, Mathinna and Lisle in the north-east, and the Mount Lyell and Henty ground on the West Coast. Creeks draining those areas carry alluvial gold.

Are there gold deposits in Tasmania that are still mined?

Yes. The Henty underground mine near Queenstown is producing, with a reported reserve of 198,000 ounces in September 2026. Beaconsfield stopped mining in June 2012.

Do I need a licence to prospect for gold in Tasmania?

Yes, outside the 11 declared fossicking areas. A Prospecting Licence costs A$39.20 in 2026-27 and can run for up to five years.

How much is a Tasmanian fossicking licence?

There is no fossicking licence as such. Fossicking in a declared area needs none, and a Prospecting Licence for anywhere else is A$39.20 in 2026-27. Check the current fee with Mineral Resources Tasmania.

Where can I fossick in Tasmania without a licence?

In Coal Hill, Colebrook Hill, Gladstone, Killiecrankie, Lord Brassey, Lune River, Magnet, Penguin, Tunnel Marsh, Weld River and Weymouth, using hand tools to 2 metres.

Can I use a metal detector for gold in Tasmania?

The licence covers hand-held instruments (ABLIS). Check the conditions for the area you plan to use, and the land manager’s rules, before taking a detector onto the ground.

Can I pan for gold in Tasmania?

Yes, with hand tools. Inside a fossicking area no licence is needed; elsewhere you need the Prospecting Licence plus permission from the land manager.

Where do I find Mineral Resources Tasmania maps?

On MRT’s Prospecting Access map, which shows whether prospecting is allowed, not allowed or needs permission at a spot, and in its Fossicking Areas map service.

Is dredging allowed in Tasmania?

Motorised pumps, trommels and mechanical machinery are excluded from the Prospecting Licence, so powered dredging is not covered by it.

What is the difference between prospecting and fossicking in Tasmania?

In Tasmania’s rules, fossicking is the hand search for minerals inside a declared fossicking area, which needs no licence. Prospecting elsewhere needs a Prospecting Licence from MRT.