When a child, my parents sent me to a central western NSW farm to recover from glandular fever. In order to shake me off, every day the grazier sent me down to the creek with a gold pan. Recuperative days were spent in the sun panning, collecting gold, sapphires and zircon and having a watchful eye for snakes. I became fascinated with geology. I recovered from glandular fever, was infected with gold fever, an incurable disease, and, when an adult, chased gold all over the world as a geologist.

Cosmic processes billions of years ago created element number 79 which can be drawn into wire, moulded, crafted, beaten into sheets only a few atoms thick and alloyed with other metals to make it harder. There is no colour or lustre like that of the evocative yellow metal.

Gold is the first mineral mentioned in the Bible. In Genesis 2:12 the riches of the land of Havilah were described ‘And the gold of that land is good;…’. Here we have the commodity: gold. The market was created only ten verses later in Genesis 2:22 which states that ‘the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.’ Commodities need a market and about half of all the gold produced now is used in women’s jewelry, mainly in Middle Eastern and sub-continental cultures. The rest of the gold is used in electronics, central bank holdings and for investment.

Gold and mythology go hand-in-hand. Norse mythology underpinned Wagner’s first Ring cycle opera, Das Rheingold, where maidens guard the immense alluvial gold treasures of the Rhine River. Like many myths, there is an element of truth. The Rhine River contains alluvial gold derived from the Alps of Switzerland and Austria where Celts mined surface gold and Roman slaves mined reef gold underground. I have been to a number of these mines. After Roman mining, they were covered by glaciers, exposed in Medieval times, covered again by glaciers in the Little Ice Age and exposed again in modern times. Das Rheingold is about the theft of gold which, when crafted into a ring, gave the wearer dominion over the world.

There is a Chinese myth that, in the long ago, a noble patrician suicide was to drink molten gold. The momentum of heavy liquid gold at a temperature greater than 1064 degrees Celsius was enough to do the job. Painfully. Maybe it’s not a myth.

Philosopher’s stone was a legendary substance with the power to convert base metals such as lead into gold and to create the elixir of life thereby granting immortality. Again, there is an element of truth. There are well-known chemical exchange reactions to convert aluminium to iron, a process used for the welding of railway tracks across the Nullarbor, and change iron into copper, used in some solution copper mines. Fundamental laws of chemistry however prevent conversion of base metals to gold.

Gold and theft also go hand-in-hand. Where there is visible gold in underground mines, normally it is one piece for the boss and one for the miner. Or is it two or three? The same occurs with alluvial mining where there may be a few nuggets amongst gold dust awaiting theft.

The gold-mining city of Kalgoorlie has the gold police, officially known as the Gold Stealing Detection Unit. Gold from every mine has a unique trace element fingerprint and isotopic signature which can be used to identify the source of the gold, even if it has been melted down, mixed with gold from other places and poured into ingots or fabricated. I shouldn’t tell you this but you can outsmart the gold police. Peg a mining lease next door to the target mine for theft and mine a little bit of your own gold which could easily be “confused” with stolen gold from the adjacent operating mine. It should have exactly the same trace element and isotopic signature. If it doesn’t, that’s your bad luck. In gold treatment processing plants, every depression, bend or kink in pipes and drains is where gold accumulates ready for the picking.

Gold has fostered greed, war, killing, betrayal and invasions. There are far too many examples. The last Inca emperor, Atahualpa, was captured in what is now Peru in 1532 AD. In exchange for his release, the Incas agreed to fill a room with gold to the height of a raised arm and give it to the Spanish. The Spanish stole the gold and Atahualpa was executed in 1533 by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. This double-crossing ended the Inca Empire.

Many times I have seen gold sticking out of surface rocks in outback Australia. Australian aboriginals also must have observed gold in rocks and rivers. It was, however, never prized or used by the Australian aboriginals for jewelry, trade or currency as it was in almost every other culture. Why not?

After a quarter of a century of travel over 24,000 km to the mysterious eastern cultures in Cathay, the Venetian Marco Polo co-published his book ‘Travels of Marco Polo’ in about 1300 AD wherein he described the monetary system of the Yuan Dynasty. There is a chapter entitled ‘How the Great Khan Causeth the Bark of Trees, made into Something Like Paper, to Pass for Money over All His Country.’ Marco Polo was incredulous that people exchanged real money such as precious metals, gems and pearls for mulberry bark banknotes cut into different sizes, dyed, stamped with official signatures and seals by the Kublai Khan and widely used for trade and commerce.

Traders refusing to accept mulberry money were executed. Paper money substituted gold coins. By this means real wealth was transferred to the rulers. The same occurs today when banknotes substitute for precious metals. Until 1971, the US dollar could be exchanged for a fixed quantity of gold. This gold standard maintained purchasing power and allegedly prevented excessive money printing, hyperinflation, trade deficits and spending. Loss of the gold standard has allowed governments to borrow to pay the interest on previous borrowings. If all the world’s banknotes and paper gold were redeemed today for gold, there wouldn‘t be enough physical gold. Some countries such as China are accumulating gold. The price of gold has not risen but the value of paper money has fallen. Ever since the time of Jesus, a carpenter, the value of an ounce of gold has been roughly the same as a week of a carpenter’s time.

I leave George Bernard Shaw with the last words: ‘You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.’