Australian Coins

Australian coins span more than a century of minting, from the pre-decimal pennies and halfpennies struck at branches of the Royal Mint in Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth to the modern decimal wildlife series produced in Canberra. The pre-decimal coins carried their own iconography — kangaroos on the penny, wheat stalks on the threepence, the merino ram on the shilling, the coat of arms on the florin — and were denominated in a pounds-shillings-pence system that Australia shared with Britain until 1966.
 
When the country switched to dollars and cents on February 14, 1966, Stuart Devlin designed the reverses for all six decimal denominations: a feathertail glider, a frilled-neck lizard, an echidna, a lyrebird, a platypus, and a kangaroo. The result was one of the most celebrated wildlife series in world numismatics — each animal rendered in its natural behavior, not posed heraldically. Devlin's designs have remained on Australian coins for over half a century through five different portrait sculptors and two denomination withdrawals.
 
The full range of Australian coinage — from colonial-era tokens through the silver coins of the early Commonwealth to the copper-nickel decimal series and the modern steel-plated issues — records a country's evolving identity in metal. Some dates were produced in the millions and then melted, making survivors scarcer than coins with lower mintages. Every Australian coin, whether pre-decimal or post, carries a piece of a monetary history that stretches back to the first branch mints of the nineteenth century.