Thursday afternoon I belatedly fulfilled a promise to post a book to Wilcannia. The school day was just finishing and as I left the Post Office I overheard a child around eight years old:
Dad, I was so good today I got FIVE stickers.
Dad was a little distracted, navigating cars and pavements and no doubt the shopping list for tonight’s dinner.
Dad, I was so good at music today I got FIVE STICKERS!
I noticed Dad respond, but I did not hear how. For my part, I wondered what exactly one must do in music to earn FIVE stickers. Were there five different songs? Five instruments? Or was her performance five times the expected quality of a young woman attending Primary School? What unit of account does one sticker represent, that FIVE of them is such a windfall?
Regardless, five stickers was clearly a treasure indeed. A hoardable treasure, surely, for to my knowledge stickers can be traded for neither goods nor services. A store of some sort of value, perhaps, but not one ultimately realised by interest or made liquid via sale of accrued assets. Sure, Tom Sawyer likely would have traded stickers for an old doorknob, a dead rat and a used band-aid (and then for the tokens that in due course would make him CEO of Westpac) but this is 2025.
Even so, it reminded me of Silas Marner, hoarding gold under a brick in the floor of his cottage as a manifestation of the Protestant Ethic:
The symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil.
Spoiler alert – Silas Marner. TBF the book is 164 years old, not just out in cinemas.
George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe was published in 1861 – six years before Marx’s Das Kapital, which includes a study of money that has some striking parallels to Eliot’s. Obv I’m not accusing anyone of 150+ yo plagiarism. Ideas about money were in the air, which were central to the politics then emerging.
Silas Marner was a weaver. He had a loom, on which he wove cloth. By hand. This was close work that he did for very long hours, so his eyes were not great. By the time Eliot’s story really begins, Silas is a master weaver, known in his small town of Raveloe as Master Marner.