12 March

The Welcome Stranger nugget is the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found, in 1869 in Victoria, over 70kg of gold. What I find most fascinating about it though is how it shows so well that what we value is socially defined. It was buried beneath only a few centimetres of dirt, under a tree. Aboriginal people no doubt discovered it some time before, but had little to no interest in it. Most of what I post to FB is about these social behaviours. We covet what others have, we imitate or emulate it when we can’t directly take it. The value is not in the object itself, we do exactly the same thing for things made of paper. Value comes from the social status the object allows us to have.