Word: golds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Next they'll be having an "everything must go" sale at Fort Knox. The latest gold rush has tens of thousands of miners in South Africa, Russia and other gold-producing countries facing unemployment ?- because there's a rush to sell. The Bank of England offloaded 25 tons on Tuesday, dragging the price of gold down to a 20-year low. And there's worse to come, as the International Monetary Fund proceeds with plans to sell $2.6 billion of its own gold reserves to raise money for debt relief to poor countries...
...surface opals are called. Few floaters are seen now; the opals are all underground, embedded in deep layers of soft sandstone. This whole area, millions of years ago, was ocean floor. So it is relatively easy to mine, and since opal mining is entirely an individual business, like California gold mining back in 1849, it has never been industrialized...
...detecting or extracting opals. It's handwork. You just stake a claim and start digging. Sounds simple, but the trouble is that none of the conventional geological spotting techniques apply. Opals don't react chemically with the stone matrix around them, and they don't leave the "traces" that gold or diamonds do. So it is a matter of digging and digging and digging. One spot is as good as another; the chances are always essentially the same. You can drill or pick into one spot on the rock wall and find nothing or go in 6 in. away...
...union organizer, and though John is no longer a communist--few miners are; they're too solitary and anarchic by temperament--he movingly speaks of the kinship he and his mates feel with the labor traditions of Australian mining, which go back to the Eureka rebellion of the Victorian gold miners in 1854. "We have solidarity because we know all our chances are equal...
...silence is absolute. As the light gathers, it is sublime and scary. When the low, fretted bars of cloud on the eastern horizon go from gray to molten gold, seconds before the sun's rim peers over the desert, it's the closest thing I have ever experienced to being in outer space. Then, as the light floods the plain, its birds begin to move: the black crows, the white cockatoos uttering their first tentative dawn screams, the rainbow lorikeets. A hawk sails over, and a mob of kangaroos hop by. A new day, the merest crumb of eternity...