Time for another still life, and here I drill into some samples from my much-neglected coin collection. Since I'm hardly an avid numismatist, you won't find any mints or proofs in there. (So don't bother trying to burgle me, or if you do don't say that I didn't warn you about the bear traps.) However I've accumulated a number of coins which have "done the rounds", leaving you wondering what other lives and times they may have seen. I do also tend to collect "special edition" Australian coins.
Amongst these are some Australian pennies ranging from 1912 (the year of the sinking of the Titanic) to 1964 (two years before decimal currency). These days we don't even have 1 and 2 cent pieces, and my bet is that the 5 isn't long for this world either. Back then, though, a "penny" was worth enough to justify these gargantuan bronze coins. The Shilling (12 pence) was much smaller, as you can see from the 1955 example, and the threepence and 6 pence (not shown here) were tiny. (I believe that the 12 sided three pence in the upper right is a British coin, not an Australian one.)
The round Australian 50 cent piece (bottom left) was issued only for the first year of decimal currency. It was being mistaken for the $0.20 at the time (an example of which is at the bottom right) and was replaced by the 12 sided type (far left) from 1967. The 1966 $0.50's are more valuable than face value these days, having a higher content of silver than their replacements. A standard 50 cent piece has the Australian coat of arms on the reverse, but the one seen here was a special edition to commemorate the bicentenary of Captain James T. Cook's voyage up the east coast of Australia. (Let's see if anyone picks that one up...)
The standard 20 cent piece features a platypus but the one shown here has the Exhibition building, familiar to visitors to my Miscellaneous Melbourne gallery.
The oldest coin in this group is a 10 Pfennig piece from Germany in 1906 when Kaiser Wilhelm was still strutting the stage. Elsewhere is a New Zealand Half Crown from 1950, a square 1 cent piece from the Straits Settlements (now Singapore and parts of Malaysia) in 1920, a 50 centiem piece from Belgium in 1928, a post-war Italian 100 lire coin, an Australian half penny from 1938... oh, and 25 cents from O Canada.
I've deliberately used an angled light, so the strong shadows are intentional.
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Edit April 2024: Against all odds, the $0.05 piece is still around. Of course cash itself is now under serious threat, with ongoing speculation that it will be phased out especially since the Covid debacle which saw cash handling fall off a cliff because of sanitation issues. Of course... in 2010 nobody saw THAT coming.
