4,003,221 Tears From Now

Gabriel's Gully, New Zealand

At a place where a kind of road crossed on a shallow bar I shovelled away about two and a half feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate and saw the gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night" ~ Gabriel Read, 1861

On a late autumn evening in 1861, when the infant village of Dunedin was at its evening meal and the dark already falling, a lone Australian prospector stopped to try his luck at a small creek 70km away as the crow flies.

The man was Gabriel Read. The place, a few kilometres from modern Lawrence. The date, the 20th (some say the 23rd) of May. Shovelling away more than half a metre of gravel and reaching the slate bed of the creek, Read found, in his famous phrase, "gold shining like the stars of Orion on a dark, frosty night". By the time he had panned out the first shovelsful and with darkness already upon him, he had to stumble back to his tent to strike a light and see the rich residue of gold gleaming in the dish.

In Norse mythology, Freya was said to cry tears of pure gold.

Photograph Gabriel's Gully sourced from Spring Pictures

Gold Tears painting by Paul Tokarski sourced from Fine Art America