Over a period of nearly 60 years from 1913 to 1970, about 200 outstanding Queensland school students, sons and daughters of employees of the Queensland Railways, were awarded gold medals valued at £3/10/, or the equivalent in scholastic books, in memory of Railway Commissioner J F Thallon (1847–1911). The awards were designed to recognise their academic achievements and to inspire the students.
The subject of this book is coins
that have had their surfaces engraved, repurposed to communicate private and public messages. It covers the whole spectrum of engraved coins created
in Great Britain and forms a cultural backdrop of Australian culture, which pre-gold-rush era was predominantly
a British outpost. This book offers a means of decoding their stories.
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 the 1850s and 1860s. These tokens were handled, pocketed, stolen, and put in tills and church offering boxes until they became obsolete. Peter Lane explains the history of, and catalogues, the tokens made for use in South Australia.
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 more serious events, opportunities to showcase, see, compare and chat about machinery and stock.
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 of Richard Kemp, an intrigued Karen set about discovering all she could about Belle Vue Hall school and its headmaster Abel trood. she explores trood’s life in England, America and Australia, reveals student life and activities at the school he established at Belle Vue Hall, and the life and demolition of the building itself.
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 existence. All these pieces are scarce and some very rare.
