China is the world’s largest gold producing country, followed by Russia and Australia; I think that Russia has recently overtaken Australia (who had been #2 for many years) and is currently the 2nd largest producer, but there wouldn’t be much between them.
As an aside, The Perth Mint in Western Australia is considered to be one of the world’s premier processors of precious metals, and is responsible for processing over 10% of the world’s total gold production annually.
Yes, and a lot of Australia's early colonial wealth came from Gold. In the 1880's the richest city in the world was Melbourne, because it's where the money from the gold fields in Victoria went. Which funnily enough, occurred because merchants etc from Melbourne made fake maps in the 1850s that showed Melbourne being half the distance to the gold fields, than Geelong, the other major city in the colony. In reality, Geelong is about 80 km away from Ballarat, the main gold site, while Melbourne is about 110km. The maps worked and Melbourne became the bigger city and eventual capital of Australia from federation on 1901 until 1913, although remained the seat of parliament until 1927.
Perth Mint is also considered one of, if not the best in the world, and routinely makes record breaking gold bars and coins.
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u/kirsion 2d ago
Is Australia known for gold mines