Gold is so rare, so admired, that it’s endlessly recycled and forever repurposed
Gold has never lost its sparkle, the precious metal is sprinkled throughout history from The Logies to Trump’s golden elevator and all the way to the next gold rush.
A personal question. Do you have a gold filling in your gob? Or a gold ring on the third finger of your left hand? Then let’s have no talk of 24 karat, which means it’s at least 99.9 per cent pure. The highest quality gold, soft and malleable – the top choice for jewellery. Because any gold in your tooth or on your finger is highly likely to have started its working life in ancient Egypt or the Roman or Aztec Empires, for gold is so rare, so admired, that it’s endlessly recycled, forever repurposed.
Of course, it might have come from a single source during a gold rush – like the one in California in the 1850s, or the Klondike rush of the 1890s in Canada’s Yukon Territory, so memorably depicted in Charles Chaplin’s silent film The Gold Rush in 1925. Or closer to home in Victoria’s gold rush of 1851 to the late 1860s. It might have been found as a nugget, just lying there waiting for someone to trip over it. Or as tiny flecks of alluvial gold in the beds of creeks. But mostly gold is blended from stuff that’s mined in many places and times.
And for all its ubiquity, it retains its value because of its rarity. In all of human history, the entire quantity of gold – including all the ingots in Fort Knox and all the gold in our jewellery – could be accommodated in a cube about 22m across. In other words, you could stow it on a couple of floors of a city building, assuming the place was strong enough.
Talking of city buildings. All the gold that glistens at Trump Towers (including his famous golden elevator), all the gold that the gaudy POTUS has now crammed into the previously understated Oval Office, all the gold at Mar-a-Lago, even the gold dust that seems to colour The Donald’s hair – all of this is next to naught in the great scheme of golden things. The Vatican’s gold reserves in reliquaries and sundry religious trinkets makes Trump look like what he has often been, a bankrupt.
But it’s not only gold’s rarity that makes it so prized. The lustrous yellow material is the most talented of metals. As well as being used in precious jewellery, you’ll find it in fine art. (Think of King Tut’s burial mask). Gilding and plating? Yes. Even as edible garnishing. But it’s also valued for its electrical conductivity, its malleability and the fact that it doesn’t rust. All of which means it plays a role in aerospace, protecting satellites from harmful solar radiation. There’s even gold in the inner workings of smartphones.
Gold serves as a useful catalyst in chemical reactions and plays dozens of vital roles in medicine, ranging from surgical tools to drug delivery. Thus, gold fills more than your teeth.
Your gold Logie wouldn’t be the same without it. Ditto the Oscars and Grammys. And let’s not forget gold coins – and the gold backing for currencies.
I’m off now. I’m making another attempt to find Lasseter’s Lost Reef, and start another gold rush. I’ll leave you with some favourite sayings about this wonderful stuff.
The Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules (Anon).
Gold makes the ugly beautiful (Molière).
All that glisters is not gold (Shakespeare).
Gold is the corpse of value (Karl Marx).
Gold is the sweat of the Sun (Native American proverb).
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