When small change was hard to obtain, some merchants minted and branded their own unofficial currency. Tokens were used as normal currency, accepted by everyone everywhere until British coins became readily available. Copper ‘token’ pennies and halfpennies were circulating in all the Australian colonies in ...
Australia’s first agricultural society was founded 195 years ago, to organise shows and encourage better farming practices. They are still going strong, and even today agricultural shows attract a lot of interest in the cities, with millions visiting across the nation. For those on the land, they are much mor...
John Locksley Kemp, a descendant of Richard Kemp, gave a silver medal, passed down through the Kemp family, to the Powerhouse Museum in 1984. Very little was known about the medal’s history until Karen Eaton came across it by chance while viewing the Museum’s on-line collection database. Also a descendant o...
For centuries, coins and medals have depicted maps of Australia, although rarely if at all have they been studied by scholars. Perhaps this is because of their limited contribution to cartography, as they were used mainly in a political sense. Perhaps collectors and academics are simply unaware of their existen...