IMAGINE sticking a roo in your pocket, an emu in your wallet or buying your coffee with an Aussie.
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Dollars and cents stuck, but were far from the only names suggested when Australia turned to decimal currency in 1966.
I was one of many, as about a nine-year-old, couldn't wait to finish school that day to run down and get my first look at the coins.
- Greg McDonald
Sunday marks 50 years since the day, as the jingle promised, modern money came in “to replace the pounds and the shillings and the pence” (phrase to be thought to the tune of Click Go The Shears please).
But Border numismatist author Greg McDonald, who has written 27 books on coins and banknotes, said the government actually began working towards decimal currency seven years earlier, in 1959.
“It was becoming more common around the world,” he said.
“The other thing was it was very difficult to quickly add things up because you had 12 pennies made a shilling, 20 shillings made a pound, 21 shillings made a guinea.”
An open competition sought names for the new money.
“Some of them were just absolutely nuts,” Mr McDonald said. “Some people wanted to call them the roo or the emu, the Aussie, the austral.
“(Then PM) Bob Menzies was very much an Anglophile, he wanted to call it the royal instead of the dollar.
“There was a lot of kerfuffle about what they were going to do or not going to do and in the end they just decided on the dollar.”
After that had been settled came the huge task of preparing for the change.
“It was a logistical nightmare for the mint to do it,” Mr McDonald said.
“When you take the width and breadth of Australia and some of these little, tiny, one-horse towns that might have had a bank that opened three times a week or something.
“They had to make sure that every single mint had enough coins for the changeover and it wasn't like, 'Oh we'll get ours next week', everyone had to have it there.
“There was not one robbery in all that time, it was probably one of the most well constructed and organised things.”
The author himself remembers the excitement.
“I was one of many, as about a nine-year-old, couldn't wait to finish school that day to run down and get my first look at the coins,” Mr McDonald said.