Australia 1959 1000 Dollar Unissued Commonwealth Treasury Bond

Dated September 1959

Signed by Harold Holt, Australian Commonwealth Treasurer

As far as I am aware, Note Printing Australia has always printed the Commonwealth Government of Australia's bonds, I am not aware that this work has ever been performed by a private company.

Although this specimen bond was never issued, it looks great; is quite rare and I believe is probably evidence of of likely privatization pressures on the Commonwealth government the early 1980's.

There would be an interesting back story to this bond - the fact that JP Morgan is identified as being involved on it, and as the bond has Howard Holt's signature on it (albeit a facsimile), leads me to think that this specimen was the result of some fairly advanced planing.

I do not see a printing company going to the trouble of designing a series of rather intricate and complicated specimen bonds for a country that has never had them privately printed before, unless there was some prospect of them getting the work.

JP Morgan could have had the printer prepare some of the specimens as part of a pitch to market Australian government bonds at that time, they may have paid the printer regardless.

This is of course uniformed speculation, and there could be a completely different explanation for this bond's existence.

Once the archives of the printer (The United States Banknote Corporation) were sold in the 1990's, a small group of unissued bonds came onto the market.

This particular bond measures 30cm * 20cm, the frame it is housed in is measured at 30cm * 40cm.

SKU: 17276