The Welcome Stranger is an alluvial gold nugget which is the biggest ever discovered, and was unearthed by Cornish miners John Deason and Richard Oates on 5 February 1869, 9 miles north-west of Dunolly, Australia.

A gold nugget is a naturally occurring piece of native gold. Watercourses often concentrate nuggets and finer gold in placers. Nuggets are recovered by placer mining, but they are also found in residual deposits where the gold-bearing veins or lodes are weathered. Nuggets are also found in the tailings piles of previous mining operations, especially those left by gold mining dredges.