George Orwell's first-edition 1984 was discovered in a donation bin of about 200 books in Wollongong, Australia, south of Sydney. (Associated Press)A rare, first-edition copy of George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984 has fetched about $2,000 at an Australian charity auction on the weekend, after it turned up in a donation bin last week.

The red-covered tome drew intense interest and record crowds to Lifeline's three-day book fair in the city of Wollongong, located south of Sydney, according to organizers.

"We had a lot of people looking at it. It took people's curiosity," Graham Gould, South coast Lifeline director, told Australian media about the $2,000 Australian (about $2,010 Cdn) sale.

"We had two actual bids for the book .… We had a reserve of $1,800 Australian, so it fetched above the reserve and sold at market value," Gould added.

The winning bid for 1984 came from a woman hailing from Figtree, a suburb of Wollongong.

Last week, a Lifeline volunteer sifting through a donation bin of about 200 books discovered the Orwell novel, one of the first editions of the book published in 1949.

The book was one out of approximately 66,000 books donated to the charity auction, and the group said that it could not identify where it had come from.

Overall, the auction raised about $19,000 Australian (about $18,100 Cdn) for Lifeline, an Australian crisis support hotline.