Page 2 of Decimal Coins & Banknotes

In the middle of 2015, a 1966 silver Australian uniface obverse pattern dollar coin was offered for sale via public auction. This coin had not been seen on the open market since March 1988, so it was an exciting offering. Excitement was building in the collector market as the 50 anniversary of de...

Across 2015, the Australian numismatic community saw a polymer $50 note that was truly unusual - it was violet and green in colour, and had designs vastly different to those we see in circulation. It turned out that the note was actually used by CSIRO across the 1970’s in their testing ...

While attending a local coin, stamp and note show in Perth, I spotted a 1966 VIP Uncirculated decimal coin set on the table of another dealer. I’ve handled several of these sets, and regard them as a truly scarce memento of a major event in Australia’s economic history - one that often has a uniq...

One of the biggest business books of the past decade was surely "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, written by Nassim Taleb and published in 2007. Taleb's book focuses on the impact that rare and unpredictable events have, as well as the human tendency to retrospectiv...

To the uninitiated, Australia’s paper decimal banknotes remained largely the same between 1966 and 1996. Sure, the serial numbers may have changed over time, but the designs remained the same for pretty much 30 years. The collectors that have studied this series know that a number of im...

Australia's NGB $10 banknote was released into general circulation on 20 September 2017, with nowhere near the same vacuous fury that we saw on social media 12 months earlier when the NGB $5 note was released....

To the uninitiated, polymer “Charity Sheet"" notes appear to be a new type of specimen note - as with the polymer specimen notes issued between 1988 and 1996, each charity sheet note features “000000” after the serial prefix, so the initial confusion is understandable. Charity Sheet not...

Printing banknotes is just like any other mass manufacturing process, and even though the end product of the banknote production process is rather more celebrated than the average bolt or screw, just like the average bolt-producing machine, banknote printing presses work perfectly 99.99% of the t...