Page 2 of Australian Gold Coinage

To the Australian sovereign collector, the adoption of the Small Head portrait of King George V doesn’t appear to have been urgently required - it does not correspond with any major anniversary of George V’s reign. I have not been able to locate any s...

Although a mint was not established in Victoria until 1872, as early as the 1850s the Victorian Government and business community lobbied the various decision makers in London for the first overseas branch of the Royal Mint to be located in Melbourne. Although historians have recorded rivalry bet...

The 1856 Sydney half sovereign with the Type 2 reverse (HST256R2) was for several years unique within the Australian gold coin series - no other circulating Australian half sovereign was known with this exact reverse design. ...

The document I’m referring to isn’t specifically about “Australian” sovereigns, but was written on the British sovereigns featuring Joseph Edgar Boehm’s “Jubilee” portrait of Queen Victoria, stuck by the Royal Mint between 1887 and 1893. The brochure ...

The 1852 Adelaide Ingots are counted among Australia’s most historic numismatic items - they were the very first items produced by the Adelaide Assay Office following the discovery of gold at Mount Alexander (in Victoria) in November 1851. These enigmatic sla...

The 1852 Adelaide Pound is Australia’s first gold coin, minted in response to problems caused by the discovery of gold at Mount Alexander (Victoria) in November 1851. It is one of Australia’s rarest and most coveted coins, and is seldom seen on the collector market. The story surroundin...

The 1926 Sydney sovereign is something of an enigma to many numismatists: published information on it is almost as rare as the coin itself. Although the official gold sovereign mintage for Sydney in 1926 is 131,050, many senior numismatists believe that 131,000 were shipped to London as...

The 1887 Melbourne Shield is the last of the enigmatic rare dates that are among the Australian Shield sovereign series. It is one of the few Australian sovereigns that are rarer than their equivalent half-sovereign and is also one of the rarest coins ever struck by the Melbourne Mint. ...