A newspaper column raised two risks to the copper story: communities resisting data centres, and carmakers rewiring in aluminium. This Insight follows both threads to their sources, sets them against a century of substitution history, and then turns to the Australian ground: who produces, who holds a resource, and how to weigh the explorers still looking for one.

A handful of the world's giant copper mines also carry platinum and palladium. They are rarely worth mining on their own — but the story of how they got there is one of the clearest windows we have into how a copper-gold deposit is made. This is that story, told for the curious rather than the credentialled.