The Spent Dollar

The use of the dollar as currency in Australia goes back to when the young colony was suffering from many growing pains, of which coinage was one.

Often short of coins herself, England's colonies suffered even more so. Queen Anne proclaimed in 1704 that captured Spanish dollars and their fractional parts were officially accepted currency in the 'British North American Colonies'. In 1788 Governor Phillip arrived with soldiers and convicts of the First Fleet to take up the new British colony of New South Wales. The money he brought with him soon dissipated over the next few years in buying supplies from merchant ships arriving from America and India. By 1796 the barter method was firmly established, soon to be followed by a fraudulent-prone IOU system. The members of John Macarther's New South Wales Corps received their pay by the more reliable method of promissory notes. Of course it is well known that with Phillip's return to England in 1792, the new colony being without a governor until Hunter's arrival in 1795, the New South Wales Corps took control of all merchandise arriving in the colony, selling to the settlers at profit. Soon to become known as the Rum Corps, Macarther's soldiers also took control of rum (the general term for spirits) and, following Phillips departure, made rum the currency for wages. Australia's first bushranger, Black Caesar, had a reward of 22 gallons (100 litres) of rum offered for his capture.

Currencies other than Spanish dollars such as Dutch ducats, Portuguese johannas and some Indian pagodas were traded in the new colony of New South Wales but they left the shores almost as soon as they arrived. There was to be little assistance from England as she too was short of coins, having to stamp George III's head over that of the Spanish king on captured Spanish dollars for her own coinage.

Lachlan Macquarie
Governor Lachlan Macquarie 		To prevent the re-exportation of coins from Trinidad in the British West Indies a proclamation was issued in June 1811 permitting the circulation of a cut dollar and the centre, or dump, from the cut dollar. This cut dollar was to become known as the holey dollar and was valued at nine shillings and the dump at one shilling. This practice of producing two coins by punching one from the original probably came to the attention of the enterprising Scot Lachlan Macquarie, who became governor of the colony of New South Wales in 1810.

In 1810 Macquarie proclaimed that there would be severe penalties for those using other than 'Stirling Money' because of the destructive issue of what were known as 'Currency Notes'. This action gave birth to the terms Currency Lads and Currency Lasses as opposed to Stirling: the colonial currency as well as the native born being inferior to the 'real thing', the Stirling currency and the English born.
        
Possibly at Macquarie's request, a special shipment of 40 000 Spanish dollars arrived in New South Wales in 1810 from Bengal. A proclamation dated 1 July 1813 read, in part:

And whereas His Excellency the Governor hath therefore thought proper to direct that a small Circular piece of Silver shall be struck out of the Centre of every such dollar, which together with the remaining part of every such dollar is intended to be issued and circulated at the value and under the regulations hereinafter described.
Continuing, the proclamation explained that the smaller piece of 'Silver' (the dump) would have the impression of a crown with 'New South Wales' and the date '1813' stamped below on one side, with the value 'Fifteen Pence' stamped on the other. The larger piece of silver had the words 'Five Shillings' and a branch of laurel stamped on one side with 'New South Wales' and '1813' on the reverse side. The outer rim of the dump and both sides of the inner rim of the holey dollar were described as 'grained', that is they had been stamped with a straight knurl-type impression around those surfaces. Of the holey dollar the proclamation said that it:

... shall be current within the territory, and every part thereof, for the sum of Five shillings of lawful Money of the Untied Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of English value and Currency.

The holey dollar was the colony's legal tender until 1829 when England solved her coin production problems and sent adequate supplies to her colonies. During that time the dollar became an integral part of the language. Subscription to the Sydney Gazette in 1822 was altered from 'fifty-two shillings stirling per annum' to twelve dollars. On 5 January 1826 a subscriber to the same publication offered a reward of ten dollars for the return of his kangaroo dog.

holey dollarWhile the holey dollar brought stability to the day to day commerce of New South Wales, and its shape prevented it from leaving the colony's shores in any numbers, it was not without some threat. On 5 May 1821 the Bank of New South Wales published a notice which said, in part: 'A Number of Bad Dollars and Dumps having been lately offered in Payment at the Bank of New South Wales ...'. The warning noted that many of these counterfeits could be detected by the date stamped on the coin - instead of 1813 they had been incorrectly stamped '1381'!

From the period of the original captured Spanish dollar and then through the stamping of the holey dollar in 1813 till it ceased to be legal tender in 1829, the term lived on as the value of five shillings until the introduction of the decimal currency on 14 February 1966. Many years after it had been taken out of circulation the town of Ulladulla on the south coast of New South Wales was still known in the vernacular as 'Holey Dollar'. Oxford scholar, being rhyming slang for dollar, could have originated in England by those colourful manipulators of the English language the cockneys, and brought to these shores by a migrant or convict. Perhaps one of the latter coined the term after their arrival here - the answer lies somewhere in the past.
                                                                        

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