I had a great day out with Chris, my aunt, in Perth.  First stop was IKEA done in record time of 10 minutes!  Then off to The Perth Mint to learn about the first gold diggers.  The story goes that 2 men had spent months travelling looking for gold.  One night they set up camp, near Halls Creek in northern WA and over night there was a terrible storm that almost swept them away.  In the morning they found the rain had washed the top soil away leaving gold nuggets exposed.  

Two other men found gold when their horse drawn cart hit a rock and broke the cart axle. When they checked it out they found the rock was a huge lump of gold too heavy to carry so they ditched the cart and the horse dragged the gold to the next town.  We learnt about how these people lived in harsh conditions as they mined for gold.

In The Perth Mint we saw the largest pure gold coin in the world.  It weighs one tonne, is valued at $50 million and has the Australian kangaroo printed on it. We were able to pick up a bar of gold worth more than $500,000 and saw glittering displays of natural gold nuggets.Summer stood on scales that measured her weight in gold.  She was worth $1,850,310.00.

The very best part of the tour was watching the gold melt. Having just taught Summer about melting points of metals for science it was great to see it in action.  We went into the pouring house where the gold was already in the furnace melted.  It was a hot day and this room was even hotter.  As the liquid gold was poured into the mold Summer said, “That man has got the best job ever!”.  The mold was dropped into cold water and within 2 minutes the gold had gone from molten metal to a solid bar we could hold.  They have reused the same bar of gold for decades melting and solidifying it over and over again and the bricks of the chimney above the furnace are literally embedded with gold dust.