Australian coins / how this compares
Somebody asked, reasonably, what this catalogue gives you that Numista and Coins and Australia do not. So we read both, for the same coins, and wrote down what was on the page. Where they are better, they are better, and it says so.
Both of those sites are good, and they are good at different things than this one. Coins and Australia is a price guide and the best-known one in the country; if you want to know what a coin is worth, go there, because this catalogue will never tell you. Numista catalogues the whole world, which this does not attempt. Neither of them is doing anything wrong by not carrying what is below. They are answering a different question.
The question this one answers is where did that number come from, and what did it count? That sounds like pedantry until it changes the answer, so here are three coins where it does.
| Numista prints | 1 008 000 |
| This catalogue | 1,000,800 issued |
1937 | 1 008 000 | Circulation | 94%
Three separate records of the Australian crown survive in the Royal Mint's reports: what Melbourne coined, what the Treasury issued, and a cumulative total reprinted 38 times between 1945 and 1966. Nobody had put them side by side. They close to the pound at £275,600, or 1,102,400 pieces for the whole coinage. The figure in general circulation makes it 1,109,600, which is 7,200 more than any of the three records allows. Note that the 1938 figure agrees exactly, on every site, including ours. That is what makes this worth showing rather than a squabble: the disagreement is one number wide, and you can go and read the three records it fails against.
the page read, 2026-09-01
| Numista prints | 84 900 000 |
| This catalogue | 84,900,000 final-mintage-as-published |
2010 | 84 900 000 | ... | Circulation | 16%
The Mint publishes this coin twice. Its website says 84.9 million, printed in millions, so the figure is known to within fifty thousand and not to the unit. Its annual reports, covering the same coin, account for 104,943,000 struck. That is a gap of twenty million, in the Mint's own two publications, and rounding cannot explain it. A reader who only ever sees 84,900,000 has no way to know the other number exists.
the page read, 2026-09-01
| Numista prints | 3 768 000 |
| This catalogue | 3,768,000 struck-in-report-year |
1911 | 3 768 000 | ... | London Mint | 16%
Here everybody agrees, to the unit, and that is the point. The number is real. What no source says is that it is what the Royal Mint in London struck for Australia during report year 1911, and Australia's early pennies were made in England and India. It is not a count of coins bearing the date 1911, and nobody has ever claimed it was, because nobody has ever said what it was.
the page read, 2026-09-01
| Numista | Coins and Australia | This catalogue | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A mintage figure for most issues | yes | yes, mostly | yes, 913 of 948 |
| What that figure counts | never stated | never stated | on every figure |
| The document it came from | KM# and Schön#, both secondary catalogues | not given | the primary record, with the page |
| A verbatim quote you can check | no | no | on 973 mintage facts |
| Both figures where two sources disagree | one figure only | one figure only | both, plus what each counted |
| Varieties | yes | yes, and it enumerates more of them | 92 across 54 issues |
| How to tell them apart, at the bench | names them only | yes, and it is good | on 14 varieties, quoted from the journal |
| Statutory specifications | as data | as data | quoted from the Act that set them |
| What a coin is worth | a value guide from user reports | yes, its whole purpose | never, on purpose |
| Coins withdrawn and melted | no | no | 147 records |
| What the Mint paid for its silver | no | no | 237 records |
| Manufacturing yield, bar to coin | no | no | 197 records |
| What the coins actually assayed | no | no | 49 records |
| What the Treasury issued | no | no | 376 records |
| How many were still in circulation | no | no | 39 records |
| Bulk data, free, no key | an API, on request | no | JSON and JSONL, CC BY |
| The whole world | yes | Australia | Australia |
| A collection manager | across the world catalogue | no | Australian issues, in your browser |
Read on 2026-09-01 from the pages listed above and in comparison.json. Both sites are large and change; this describes what was on those pages on that day, not a permanent claim about either.
Its 1920 penny page lists seven varieties where we list three, because it splits each dot position by obverse type: "Dot below lower scroll - Indian" and "- English" are separate rows there and one row here. That is a real gap and it is still open. What was ALSO a gap when this page was first written, and is now closed, was the bench test: their page tells you the Indian obverse has 178 beads and the N of OMN points to a denticle, and ours simply said "Indian master-die obverse". We had the test all along, from the Numismatic Association of Australia's journal rather than an unsourced page, sitting in a row of its own and connected to nothing. It is now attached to all 14 varieties whose identification turns on it, with the quote and the source. Finding that took a stranger telling us our site was no good.
Retail prices by grade, melt values and auction results. This is the single most common thing people want and we do not carry it, on purpose, because a price is a market's opinion on a day and not a fact anyone can quote from a document.
Numista catalogues the world. This catalogue does one country, and there is no sense in which it replaces a world catalogue.
Numista tracks what you own across the whole world catalogue and matches you with other collectors. Ours marks off Australian issues in your own browser and that is all it does.
Past collating other catalogues, into the branch mints' own memoranda. These are seven kinds of record the Royal Mint published every year and no coin catalogue reprints. Neither of the two sites above carries any of it, on any page we read.
1,132 records in all, each carrying the report it was read from and a verbatim quote. records.jsonl
The one a collector feels first is the last one. A mintage tells you how many were made; it cannot tell you how many survived, because it says nothing about how many came back. In 1933 the Deputy Master of the Melbourne branch had the Commonwealth Bank supply him parcels of coin worth £1,000 each, taken from what came in over the counter on different days, and sorted 75,000 coins into date bands. Somebody measured the thing everyone else estimates. Once, in 1933, and then nobody printed it again.
A price. Four of the five commonest ways people finish the phrase "australian coins" in a search box ask what they are worth, so this is the most wanted thing on the site and the one thing here that cannot be sourced to a document. A price is a market's opinion on a day. A check fails the build if one appears. For that, use the price guide: it is better at it than we would be, and it is free.