Help needed to ID specimens

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Hello friends.
My first NSW two day trip brought me some of what resembles reef inclusions in quartz.
Had to climb goat trails in the mountains with a hammer without a detector. I'm not sure it's gold though. Maybe mica, pyrite...?
Question. Who knows the most reliable way to determine gold without crushing quartz...? Thank you.

IMG_20240712_220233.jpgIMG_20240712_220207.jpgIMG_20240712_220435.jpgIMG_20240712_215731.jpg
 
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Hello friends.
My first NSW two day trip brought me some of what resembles reef inclusions in quartz.
Had to climb goat trails in the mountains with a hammer without a detector. I'm not sure it's gold though. Maybe mica, pyrite...?
Question. Who knows the most reliable way to determine gold without crushing quartz...? Thank you.
That yellow stuff looks too glittery/glisteny for gold, IMHO. Freshly-exposed gold is pretty bright, but has more of a shiny, brassy yellow colour to it, in my experience.

If you use a pin on the yellow material and it crumbles or flakes off, that will indicate mica or pyrites, both of which are more brittle than gold, which bends rather than breaking away.
 
get a detector to go over the rock/quartz, a gpx6000 will detect very small bits of gold, failing that take it somewhere that has a spectrometer to test the sample rocks and that will test to PPM (parts per million) of any metal like gold silver copper etc in the rock samples, most of the gold buyers will have one of these machines
 

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