Don't understand the question (typo? - sate). The Welcome nugget is one of those over 15 kg on the Ballarat map (and as I mentioned, the Welcome Stranger nugget - which was larger than the Welcome - still had 25 kg of quartz attached to it and clearly came from a quartz reef worked a short distance above it on the hillside where it was found). Holtermans was a lot larger than either of them and was mined out of a quartz reef underground, in a quartz vein system that itself produced 15 tonne of gold (it was larger underground than the photographed nugget as it broke up getting it up the shaft). I was once unable to lift a "nugget" off the floor of an underground vein stope in South Africa because it was so large - the miners had just blasted it out of the vein in the stope sidewall (that vein had already produced more than a million ounces). Many lumps of gold up to hundreds of ounces (900? oz) were found in quartz reefs in Victorian gold mines during mining (McIntyres near Rheola?), and a number of others found in streams still had vein quartz attached to them. I have worked in such mines - eg one east of Woods Point (Royal Standard) that supposedly was discovered because the gold could be seen shining in the sun in the quartz from the other side of the gully. It went 700 ounces or so to the ton at shallow depths, yet probably has more tunnels driven into it that never produced an ounce of gold than any mine I know (despite them intersecting the same reef).Hunting the yellow said:
The Welcome nugget came from the foot of Black Hill, the veins of which projected south beneath the discovery site and which were very productive. The vein adjacent to the Welcome Stranger that you mention was quite productive and was mined continuously for kilometres until it ran into a granite that truncated it (the granite was later). I was involved in mapping and studying it (I qualify my comments if I am unsure about something). Relating the size of a nugget to the production of a nearby quartz reef is therefore a bit of a stretch - gold is notoriously patchy within veins. I could name many more examples if I looked them up - these are just out of my head....
Gold is deposited in all sorts of places - I have seen examples where alluvial gold was re-deposited in boulders and cobbles in the same alluvial leads as the alluvial gold (so that they were put through a crusher - Chiltern and other places I know). It is precipitated as "paint" on tree roots and preserves the shapes of bacteria that precipitate it in leads and mine dumps - it is taken up in trees and precipitated out in the leaves (again, I supervised a project on that). Gold nuggets can form from re-precipitated gold in soil, especially in the Eastern Goldfields of WA (as I mentioned - the nuggets completely enclose bits of soil). This "secondary" gold can be distinguished as a rule by its different composition (it contains no silver at all, compared with typically 3% to more than 50% silver in gold in primary deposits such as quartz veins). Even at surface in quartz veins, coarse gold with no silver is found, probably because of re-deposition of gold in the weathering zone. However there is no convincing evidence that I have seen (or read of) that large gold nuggets grew in streams removed from the original quartz veins or from the overlying soil of those veins. That idea largely came from alluvial gold miners of the 19th century who did not realise that large lumps of gold were found in quartz reefs (it was not even much publicised at the time that the Welcome Stranger was more quartz than gold by volume when it was found - they cobbed the quartz off, and it was not shown in the re-enacted illustration).
There is actually a reason why gold might not be deposited as large nuggets in streams, and it relates to chemistry. Basically, fresh water cannot dissolve gold to be able to re-deposit it, so the chemical situation in the stream would have to be quite unusual (it has been suggested that very fine gold can deposit in alluvial leads where there are algal mats in swampy flats, but this seems improbable for nuggets - happy to be proved wrong though). The chemistry of soil water in WA is often quite salty (due to evaporation of ground water), and salty water can dissolve gold and re-deposit it.
I think the reason that it was proposed in the 19th century was because so many nuggets were found with no gold attached. This is easy to explain because of the nature of gold - you can flatten it into gold leaf, draw it out into threads like cotton, roll it into balls and round it by hammering and rolling, but it is near impossible to break and nuggets get their rounded form by rounding and rolling and being pounded by harder rocks, they tend not to break down into smaller pieces easily. However quartz is very brittle, fractures readily, and soon turns into gravel than sand and silt and washes away. So no gold is left attached to a lump pf quartz and gold, soon after it washes into a stream, just gold, quartz cobbles and pebbles (often still with some gold) and quartz sand (now completely separated from gold). Much of the gold you pan is probably not a lot smaller than its original size (although it may be balls or plates or still angular). The quartz will get finer and finer as it washes downstream and continues to break up but it seems to me (purely my own supposition) that coarse grained gold and nuggets will stay close to their source because of their high density (unlike quartz) - the gold does get finer downstream but that is probably partly because streams can carry gold that was originally fine grained (when in quartz reefs) further than it can carry coarse gold.
