RUDOLF HERMANN, Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific correspondent for one of the oldest Swiss daily newspapers, Neue Zuercher Zeitung, was amongst a group of five foreign correspondents from Europe who went digging for gold in Ballarat, Bendigo and other mines of Victoria, courtesy Invest Victoria. While their stories from the three-day trip made headlines, they just missed picking up a 2kg gold nugget! The Second Gold Rush is here.

Media briefing at one of the goldmines.

As the sun broke through the mist on a late summer morning, two people emerged on Dunolly Broadway, the main street of this sleepy town in rural Victoria. Their broad smiles indicated that at last they had found what they had been looking for. Each of them was proudly carrying a nugget of pure gold.

Their prospecting success had a very simple reason, though. After a refreshing coffee break in one of those wonderful Victorian country bakeries they simply walked across the street and into a shop called "Finders - Prospecting Equipment" where apart from metal detectors, maps and other specialist equipment they found a good selection of nuggets up for sale. Searching the country with a sophisticated metal detector would have been fun, no doubt. Not only for Matthew Brace and Jens Meyer, the fast-track gold diggers, but also the rest of a group of five FCA members (Agneta Didrikson, Urs Wälterlin and Ruedi Hermann, apart from Matthew and Jens) invited by Invest Victoria to experience the new Victorian gold fever first hand. But there was simply no spare time in the tight schedule of the trip we undertook between February 20 and 23 to learn about the second gold rush in Victoria, which is just about to take off. And anyway, that two kilo nugget we would have been after had been picked up just a few days earlier by someone else, as we learnt from the local media (no kidding!). Even so, Matt and Jens were highly satisfied with their find.

Geologist and mining engineer pointing at a deposit at Bendigo underground goldmine.

To begin at the very beginning, we met in Melbourne with our host, Marc Pearce from Invest Victoria, and spent the night in the splendid Windsor, one of the historic hotels that must have been the result of that first gold rush in the 1850s. The next day we were off to Ballarat, 110 km west of Melbourne, and right into the heart of the matter. Ballarat Goldfields was the first gold mining company on our schedule. The professional presentation by CEO Richard Laufmann about how they are going to extract riches from layers of the historic goldfields, the miners from a hundred years ago did not yet have the technology to get at, sounded very promising. Not that we were taking out our wallets right away to invest spare cash in shares, but the temptation was certainly there.

Then we had a good look at what the historic gold rush had looked like. Sovereign Hill is the site of a gorgeous reconstructed mining town in the spirit of the 1850s and gives a good impression about what life was like during that era. The designers of this huge open air museum on Sovereign Hill managed to turn it into a pleasant and at the same time instructive experience, steering clear of any kind of "mining Disneyland". It is certainly a place that brings alive Australian history and is worth an extended visit.

Open cut mine Perseverance.

Not on this trip, though, as we made our way further to the north-west to the country town of Stawell, at the western tip of the so-called Victorian Golden Triangle. Stawell brought us back from history to present-day gold mining. Would it be wiser to invest our spare cash (for those who had any) here than in Ballarat? What they were telling us was also interesting, and their mine is working already. When we saw a mighty 50-tonne truck emerging from underground, Agneta was quick to rush for a photo shot without a safety helmet on! We were told by one of the miners that the gold they could expect from this load would fit into a matchbox. That sounded a bit surreal, but even so, Stawell is regarded as a mid-to-high grade deposit.

It was time for some sport after that, at least from a theoretical point of view. Who would have thought that Stawell hosts the richest professional foot race on the planet? We were wondering why we hadn't heard of it, but the participant's list actually contains some big names. So keep your eyes on the telly, the so-called "Stawell Gift" is going to happen over Easter and then you will know what it is all about.

Gold freckles in quartz rock at Bendigo underground mine.

The next day Robyn, our friendly driver and country-bakery connoisseur (she did an excellent job there!), raced us along the Goldfields tourist drive to Dunolly, where we could have bought our prospector's gear and left the tour to go bush and get rich immediately. After all, this is the place where the Welcome Stranger nugget had been found, the single biggest nugget to be found worldwide so far! But we went on to Bendigo, a historic gold town like Ballarat, and were very excited about finally going underground to see the real stuff hidden in tonnes of rock. It was a great experience and we were again faced with the gruelling question -- if it was here we should best invest our spare cash - or at least recommend others to invest theirs.

And then we turned into some sort of an attraction ourselves as we grouped for a picture for the Bendigo Advertiser, and Urs did a great job telling them all about the FCA as he did the next day for ABC local radio.

Bendigo made us Europeans feel very much at home. Is it because when the town was built after the gold rush there were many European influences around? Some of the architecture, including our splendid hotel, the Shamrock, looked like it had been implanted here from turn-of-the last century Berlin or another Central European city. Matt even considered moving from Brisbane to Bendigo (he definitely would have to buy his metal detector then!). And there's more to Bendigo than just goldmines as we found out on the way back from the impressive Fosterville open cut mine to the city. A short stopover at the workplace of a miner-turned-vigneron showed us some of the very good results of Victorian winemaking.

What would a journalists' trip be without meeting the pollies? Mark Pearce had arranged an interview with the minister for energy and resources, Theo Theophanous. It turned out to be an interesting discussion not only on the topic of gold, but in a wider context of the Victorian resources industry. And then it was just about time to rush off to the airport with kilos of documentation about gold digging in the baggage. Alas! Not kilos of gold nuggets!