A break from Gold fields guns and back to tools - over the years I have picked up many dozens of gold miners tools. Generally speaking they were just disgarded wher they wore out or broke or were of no further use.
Tools which were still of use to either the miner themselves or to someone else were often left safely stored somewhere - on two occasions I have picked up tools in caches under rock overhangs or shallow caves - whether the miner intended to come back or whether he left them for someone else in the future will never be known.
On several other occasions I have found tools stacked neatly outside the hut and in one case found a whole array of shovels, picks and so on stacked together against what had once been the chimeny, long since eroded away to cover the tools completely.
These are two hammer/picks and I assume would have been used to break up larger rocks or for hammering coal chisels into rocks to split them to facilitate ease of handling. The larger one was obviously discarded as it has been split form the hammer head down the side and had become dangerous to use as further use could have made pieces shatter off it.
The nugget of Gold was picked up by me not so long ago and weighs eight penny weights to the grain - or in modern parlance 12 grammes.
Lammerlaw attached the following image(s):
