Published pre-decimal mintages are bare numbers with no source. Rather than assume they are wrong, we tried to reverse the derivation, and on five of fourteen checkable years it comes out exactly.
Australian pre-decimal mintages are published in hobby guides, dealer sites and reference books, almost always as a bare number with no source. This catalogue could not match many of them, and rather than assume they were wrong, we tried to reverse the derivation.
A public guide widely used by collectors, TDK APDC, publishes a mintage for every pre-decimal year. Its penny figures were read off the page by on-screen position rather than document order, because the year labels and the mintage figures sit in separate parts of the markup and pairing them by text order silently mis-assigns them. That is the same flattened-table trap this catalogue has already been caught by twice.
Their figures were then compared against our own primary records: the Melbourne branch deliveries printed in the Royal Mint's annual reports, which are stated in POUNDS and which we convert at 240 pence to the pound.
The pre-1919 figures are exact pound multiples and the later ones are not. Every penny figure for 1911 to 1918 divides by 240 without remainder; from 1919 on, only 3 of 18 do. That fits the history: pennies were struck in England and India until 1918 and the Royal Mint booked those in pounds, while Australia struck its own from 1919.
Five of the fourteen checkable years reproduce exactly, and the method is visible:
| Year | What the report prints | x 240 | Commonly quoted | Difference |
| 1929 | £10,830 | 2,599,200 | 2,599,000 | -200 |
| 1931 | £2,060 | 494,400 | 494,000 | -400 |
| 1932 | £8,820 | 2,116,800 | 2,116,000 | -800 |
| 1933 | £24,240 | 5,817,600 | 5,817,000 | -600 |
| 1935 | £15,520 | 3,724,800 | 3,724,000 | -800 |
Every residual is under 1,000. The published figure is the pound-derived figure with its last three digits dropped.
It means the commonly published mintages are, at least in part, the Royal Mint's report-year delivery treated as though it were the date on the coin. That is precisely the conflation this catalogue exists to document, and it is why our figures and theirs will not always agree.
The other nine years differ by millions rather than hundreds, which no rounding explains. Those are the years where the report year and the coin date genuinely come apart, or where deliveries from more than one mint are being combined. We do not claim to have reproduced them.
We have not copied their figures into this catalogue and will not. They are cited here as evidence of what is commonly published and how it appears to have been derived. Every mintage this catalogue prints comes from a document it quotes.