On the fourteenth day of Febuary 1966 Australia moved from its imperial currency system which incorporated pounds, shillings, and pence, over to the new decimal currency system.
The change to the new decimal currency also provided an opportunity to design a completely new series of coins which would also incorporate Australian motifs. The pre-decimal coins were built up over the previous 54 years, and did not represent a standard of design, nor did they carry Australian themes.
It was decided that a 1,2,5,10 denomination of coins would be chosen, as this would give the ability to make up any amount required with the least number of coins.
Upon acceptance of the decimal currency system, the Australian Government went into full scale opperation, and when on to ensure that their new coin designs were of the highest standard, and utilised the best artistic design, and took advantage of the most current minting techniques.
Six designers were initially commissioned to come up with the designs for the new coins and they presented a number of themes. Stuart Devlin, who proposed a coin series based on Australian wildlife, was the designer eventually selected.
One of the biggest challenges initially for the Australian Mint was in working with cupro nickel which is a lot less workable than silver, and consequently shortened the life of the working dies due to the extra high pressures needed to strike the coins. The choice was to either produce high quality coins and have a low die life, or strike lesser quality coins by using less die pressure, and hence extending the life of the die.
Initially the 50c coin retained its silver content, but was shortly after replace with the base metal design made up of copper, nickel, zinc and aluminium. The initial 50c coin was not well recieved due to mass confusion over similarities between it and the previous Florin coin. It was later therefore decided that the new dodecagonal (twelve sided) coin be introduced, and is still in exsistance today.
The one and two dollar coins were not introduced as part of the decimal currency in Australian until much later, and were introduced to replace the one and two dollar paper bank notes.
Collecting of commemorative one dollar coins is considered one of the most popular areas of coin collecting in Australia, and each year both the Perth Mint and the Royal Australian Mint release beautiful additions which are eagly sought after by hobbists and collectors throughout Australia as well as the rest of the world.
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