The locations of the 17 meteorites that have been found in Victoria. Click on each of the points to learn more.

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Ballarat

A small fragment of meteorite was found deep in the Park Company gold mine in 1867. It is believed to have fallen to Earth at least three million years ago, during the Pliocene or Pleistocene epochs. A mining engineer, Henry Rosales, obtained the piece for his collection, which he donated to the University of Melbourne in the 1890s. It is classified as an iron meteorite (IAB) and is now part of the Museums Victoria State Collection.

Bealiba

This meteorite was discovered in the museum, among material that had originally been donated to the Geological Survey in 1950. Joseph Renshaw found it on his property to the north of Bealiba, but it wasn't originally identified as being meteoritic. Scientists at the museum were sorting through the material when they came across the 652g stone in 1989. It is classified as an olivine, hypersthene (L6).

Bendoc

A 27kg meteorite was reportedly found by a gold miner in a sluicing claim in 1898. Samples were sent to the NSW Department of Mines for examination and described as a stony-iron pallasite. However, the meteorite itself seems to have disappeared. 

Cranbourne

The Boon Wurrung people knew of this meteorite's existence long before white colonists, but its excavation in 1862 kicked off a tug-of-war between the Australian and British authorities. A 3.5 tonne section of it, known as the Bruce meteorite, was a highly sought after scientific prize in the 19th century. It was sent to the Natural History Museum in London, where it remains on public display. A smaller piece of the meteorite was repatriated in exchange.

Dimboola

A 16.6kg meteorite was discovered here in 1944. It is classified as an ordinary chondrite (H5). 

Dattuck

A small stone discovered in 1994, around the same time as the Turriff meteorite. However this one is yet to be described or analysed, as it is still in the possession of the person who found it. 

Kulnine

First noticed in the 1880s, but not retrieved until 1911. It was found on Kulnine station, in a crater about three metres wide. Originally sent to the South Australian Museum, it is now part of the Museums Victoria State Collection. Classified as a chondrite (L6).

Oberon Bay

This 180g stone was discovered in the hinterland of Oberon Bay, on Wilsons Promontory, in 1962 by Dr Victor Gostin. It has been identified as an olivine, hypersthene (LL6).   

Yarroweyah

This 9.6kg meteorite was found in 1903 by the children of the property’s owner, Mr T Holden. He initially broke off a small piece and sent it to the University of Melbourne for examination. The remaining stone was acquired by the museum in 1913. Classified as a hexahedrite (IIAB).

Lismore

This iron meteorite, weighing about 10kg, was found on Mr J E Spinks’ ‘Selkirk’ property in 1959.  

Willow Grove

A 2.7kg meteorite was discovered on a farm here in 1995, and a second mass weighing 9kg was found nearby three years later. The museum now has four pieces of this iron meteorite, which has an incredibly high nickel content (28%).  

Turriff

This meteorite was found on wheat-farming country in 1994, weighing 210g. It has a nearly complete fusion crust, or melted surface, from when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere. It is classified as an olivine, hypersthene (L5).

Pigick and Rainbow

While ploughing several paddocks in 1994, Wimmera farmer Darryl Wedding found 10 meteorite fragments. As it turned out, they were from two completely different meteorites. Eight of the fragments were found to be an ordinary chondrite (H5) and named Pigick, after the local parish in which they were found. The final two pieces proved to be an incredibly rare carbonaceous chondrite (CO3). This was named the Rainbow meteorite, after the local town.

Wedderburn

Discovered in 1951 by a prospector named Charles Bell, this lemon-sized iron meteorite contains one of the rarest minerals on Earth. It is thought to have been forged in the core of an ancient planet, long since destroyed, and flung across the solar system. The mineral (Fe₅C₂) was named ‘Edscottite’, after Professor Edward R Scott at the University of Hawaii.

Maryborough

The most recent meteorite to be found in Victoria, this one was found by David Hole in May 2015. He was prospecting for gold when his metal detector instead picked up this 17kg stone. David tinkered with it in his shed for several years before bringing it into the Melbourne Museum, where it was verified as an ordinary chondrite meteorite (H5). It most likely formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Murchison

This is the only known meteorite to have actually been witnessed falling and collected in Victoria. It exploded into the atmosphere on 28 September 1969 and broke apart over 35km² around Murchison. It is also rare in its composition—a carbonaceous chondrite that contains clues to the formation of solar systems, including our own. Pieces were sold all over the world, including more than 50kg to the Field Museum in Chicago, some 7kg stayed in Australia. Museums Victoria has about 3.5kg in its collection.

While the idea of a large rock from space streaking towards our planet may seem frightening, not all of them are bad news.

‘Meteorites are the cheapest form of space exploration because the rocks come to us,’ says Dermot Henry, head of sciences at Museums Victoria Research Institute.

There are at least 17 meteorites known to have fallen in Victoria alone, and they have provided invaluable insight into the formation of solar systems and even life itself.

Many more falls have likely been witnessed by First Peoples, but since Europeans arrived in Australia just one meteorite—Murchison—has been witnessed falling to Earth and recovered.

Dermot has a passion for rocks, but especially those that fall from space.

‘When I was a kid, I lived in Northern Ireland, and when I was about seven a meteorite fell and created a huge sonic boom as it whizzed through the atmosphere at high speed,’ he recalls.

This was around the time of the Apollo moon landings when human beings had first visited an extra-terrestrial body, rather than waiting for them to drop by.

‘And then as a geologist, when I started at the museum [in Melbourne] … I'd never handled a meteorite before.’

‘It was a good thing to immerse myself in and then, of course, I started to discover the wonders of the Murchison meteorite—probably the most studied meteorite.’

Raw planetary ingredients

Murchison is a small town, 160km north of Melbourne, but in 1969 it became the centre of attention.

Just two months after Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon—when space-fever was at its zenith—a meteor exploded into the atmosphere, broke up, and landed across 35km².

‘It’s typical that particularly stony meteorites explode as they come through the atmosphere, and then you get hundreds of fragments,’ says Dermot.

‘It must have been traveling really fast when it exploded because all the little fragments continued to melt on the outside.’

Scientific institutions across the world scrambled to get a piece of the action, buying up whatever they could from locals.

In all about 100kg of it was collected, about half of which went to the Field Museum in Chicago (Melbourne Museum, meanwhile, has about 3.5kg).

The results that poured in over the next few years were astonishing.

‘Our solar system formed from a gaseous cloud which contains microscopic dust particles—mainly tiny crystals—supplied from dying stars,’ says Dermot.

‘These tiny minerals are called pre-solar grains because they formed in stars before our own sun had switched on.’

And Murchison turned out to be a rich source of these pre-solar grains, including microdiamonds and silicon carbide.  

This means the Murchison meteorite is billions of years older than our own solar system.  

‘Holding a rock that contains tiny crystals that are maybe three or four billion years older than our planet is pretty awesome, I think,’ says Dermot.

Murchison also contains hundreds of organic compounds, including amino acids—the building blocks of your DNA—that are not found on Earth.

‘Murchison has shown that these organic molecules—the building blocks of life—can form out there in the hostile environment of space,’ says Dermot.

‘The arrival of meteorites, like Murchison, may well have seeded life on Earth.’

In addition to potentially offering clues to the origins of life, these molecules give Murchison an unusual smell.

‘Locals that had recovered fragments of Murchison all remarked on the strong aroma of methylated spirits,’ says Dermot.

These odour-causing substances were later identified as aromatic hydrocarbons.

‘It’s yielded so much data across so many different areas,’ says Dermot.

‘Murchison also provides information on how the elements of the periodic table form within stars and how stars evolve over time.’

And new discoveries are still being made, more than 50 years later.

Part of the reason for this is because it was collected so quickly, there was very little time for terrestrial contamination.

Murchison is a type of carbonaceous chondrite (designated CM2), or stony meteorite, that contains a lot of water.

The name refers to the presence of chondrules: small spherical crystalline structures that often melt together to form larger rocky bodies.

‘All of these carbonaceous chondrites are what we refer to as being chemically primitive,’ explains Dermot.

‘They contain ingredients that formed very early on in the solar system, and they haven't been altered much since.

‘They're quite a rare bunch of meteorites.’

Other types of carbonaceous chondrites are rarer still.

There are only a handful of known falls of CO3 carbonaceous chondrite meteorites in the world, and one of them was found by a farmer in western Victoria’s wheat belt in 1994.

While clearing several paddocks at his farm, near Rainbow, Darryl Wedding found 10 meteorite fragments.

The strangest thing was that they were from two completely different meteorites.

Eight of the fragments were from an ordinary chondrite meteorite (named Pigick, after the local parish); the other two pieces were an incredibly rare CO3 (named Rainbow).

‘It was quite exciting,’ says Dermot.

Darryl donated the Pigick and Rainbow meteorites to Museums Victoria, but not all meteorites come to the museum that easily.

A fight over iron

It isn’t exactly known when humans first noticed a large meteorite had fallen near Cranbourne, southeast of Melbourne.

First Peoples were aware of it, but the earliest documentation was in 1854, when part of it was used to make a horseshoe that was displayed at the Melbourne Exhibition of that year.

It wasn’t until 1860 that three large hunks of iron were identified as meteorites.

Cranbourne No. 1 weighed 3,500kg, No. 2 1,500kg, and No. 3 6.8kg.

At the time, it was the largest ever found in Australia and there was significant scientific interest in obtaining it. 

An ‘enterprising’ dealer quickly sold No. 2 to the British Museum for £300 (about AU$70,000 in today’s money).

Meanwhile colonial scientists, including the museum’s first director Frederick McCoy, fought to keep the larger specimen in Melbourne.

The British won out; the only concession made to the museum in Melbourne was the return of the No. 2 meteorite—a minor victory.

To give you an idea of how Melburnians felt about this, Australian geologist Robert Brough Smyth wrote in 1869 that its transfer to London rendered the No. 1 meteorite ‘an object of vulgar curiosity made practically useless for the purposes of scientific investigation’.

It can now be found on display at the Natural History Museum in London.

So, why all the fuss over a big lump of iron?

Iron meteorites are amongst the most frequently found, and of those the Cranbourne meteorites are the most common type: IAB-MG.

But, as Dermot says, that isn’t the whole story.

‘In actual fact about four-and-a-half per cent of all known meteorites that are witnessed falling are irons, so they're quite rare.’

Part of the reason they are found more often is they are big, heavy, and very different to Earth rocks.

Iron meteorites formed in the once-molten cores of large asteroids, like those found between Mars and Jupiter.

‘Like the Earth, these large asteroids melted and separated into an iron-nickel core, silicate mantle, and crust,’ explains Dermot.

So, these meteorites can provide us with information on the internal structures of the inner rocky planets and how they formed.

The composition can vary quite a lot—an iron meteorite found at Willow Grove is 28 per cent nickel, among the highest concentration of any found on Earth.

The biggest barrier to finding meteorites is time, and weather.

‘In places with low rainfall, meteorites can be well preserved for maybe 30,000 years,’ says Dermot.

But iron rusts—even the Cranbourne meteorites, that were found in a swampy area, ‘have sort of peeled like an onion from the weathering process’.

One Victorian meteorite, though, survived much worse.

Striking gold

During the Victorian gold rush, in the latter half of the 19th century, miners went to incredible lengths (and depths) in search of the precious metal.

But in the Park Company mine in Ballarat, prospectors found something much rarer—a small chunk of iron in river gravels buried below basalt.

A mining engineer, Henry Rosales, took the piece for his own personal collection before donating it to the University of Melbourne in the 1890s.

The meteorite was transferred to the museum in the late 1980s.

‘It had been labelled meteorite but had never been examined … then Bill Birch [then curator of minerals] started to have a look at it,’ says Dermot.

What Bill found was the meteorite had fallen to Earth at least three million years before, during the Pliocene Epoch.

So how did it end up so far below ground?

Back then, explains Dermot, Victoria was a hotbed of volcanic activity with extensive lava flows.

‘It may have fallen into that river system before the lava filled it … but it’s quite well preserved.’

These days the chances of a similar find are very slim but gold prospectors have found several other Victorian meteorites— including one that contains one of the rarest minerals on Earth.

The Wedderburn meteorite, found in 1951, has been studied by some of the world’s most renowned scientific institutions.

A research team based at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the California Institute of Technology found tiny grains of a mineral they called ‘Edscottite’ in honour Professor Edward R Scott at the University of Hawaii.

How does a mineral like this form?

It is thought to have been forged in the heart of an ancient planet, long since destroyed, and flung across the solar system until it reached us.  

Victoria’s most recent meteorite was also discovered by a gold prospector, but much closer to the surface.

David Hole found the 17kg stone using a metal detector at Maryborough in 2015, but kept it in his shed for several years before bringing it to the Melbourne Museum for identification—it turned out to be about 4.6 billion years old, so it is a good thing he did.

For anyone thinking of adding to Victoria’s collection of meteorites, Dermot’s advice is to look to the state’s arid regions.

‘Such as the Mallee and Wimmera—an area where a number of meteorites have already be recovered.’

And if you think you have found something, let us know. 

‘I’m always happy to look at a rock for someone because you never know what will turn up,’ says Dermot.