The Kangaroo Office. Fact Or Fantasy?

From the Indenture (earlier post)
" . profits gained in the year by the said Reginald Scaife in his said business of assaying smelting stamping and dealing in Gold and other metal shall exceed the sum of Two hundred."

Whose business is it; it is Scaife's
Taylor is in for 2/9ths of anything over £200 and that is from anything from the press, not just gold.

Let us entertain the numismatic fantasy for a moment.
The numbers are the trio invested in the order of £13000 to £15000.
How many sets of Kangaroo Office pieces do Scaife and Brown need to peddle before the venture breaks even?
It is a 10 year plan in the indenture.
Ignoring Scaife's cut (1/3rd of everything over £200) and Brown's remuneration.
Let's say £1500 per year for ten years and it is a pretty delusional plan that thinks the gold price differential, which has dissolved by late 1852, is going to remain for 10 years.
Being generous, say they make £2 per set. That means moving, on average, about 2 sets per day for 10 years (over 7000 sets) in a market that does not exist because by the end of 1852 the colony is rife with sovereigns. And remember that is ignoring Scaife's cut. Realistically the Kangaroo Office would need to move about 10000 sets for the investors to break even if its purpose was to make gold coins.

The margin is not there. The need for the product is not there. Both are gone by the end of 1852. The 10 year plan is so pie in the sky it is fanciful.

The only rational reason to proceed on 26 June 1853 is that the venture is not what the numismatic narrative claims because that narrative makes the trio look incomprehensibly stupid. In fact the indenture shows the numismatic narrative is rubbish. Scaife has the lease on the equipment; it is Scaife's gold business. All the investors get is a cut of the profit should all go well.

One should note that the numismatic narrative talks of profiting off the gold rush but history does not record Hodgkin's as a profiteer. He was a philanthropist. His motive would not have been profiteering. You can discount the "profiteering" part of the numismatic narrative.

Hodgkin's, the lead player in the Kangaroo Office, is trying to set up his son in law as a store keeper in the colony. That makes immeasurably more sense.

But where does that leave the bullion rounds in the numismatic picture, the rounds need Taylor, just Taylor, and they need the false narrative.

Now acknowledged by the British Museum as bullion coins in the sense of being bullion rounds, a round like an American Eagle, the Kangaroo Office pieces appear to be nothing more than residual items from a failed shop in gold rush days of Victoria.

I am quite surprised how twisted the Kangaroo narrative is and how long it has just been parroted by people who blindly trust 'the experts'.

From the moment one reads Taylor is looking to set up a mint and make national coinage alarm bells should be ringing because if one is 'into' coins then one knows he can't do that without Royal approval. The whole story is so embellished is it embarrassing for numismatics.

The moral appears to be, in part, that the experts aren't very reliable at all.

I got this from Wikipedia
"I've removed your additions to the article Thomas Hodgkin because they seem to be about a possibly entirely different person called Thomas Hodgkin. "

The lesson here is do not rely on Wikipedia.
How many Dr Thomas Hodgkin's are there with a step son Reginald Scaife who are both part of a contract to have gold business in Melbourne?
Unbelievable.

Does it really look that hard to move; especially with Taylor's man and engineer William Morgan Brown around.

I have been looking at this press, it is a photo of the Kangaroo Office press at Stokes.
Unscrew the top part and man handle the two pieces.
Seriously; how hard was it to move?
It was easy enough as Scaife moves it from the store to the exhibition hall and back with relative ease.



You might note the soure of the photo feels Taylor doesn't even rate a mention.
https://collections.museumsvictoria...items/729171

Summary

Copy negative of a medal and coin press in use at Stokes & Son, Melbourne, circa 1907.

The press had originally been brought to Australia in 1853 by Reginald Scaife for the Kangaroo Office venture, and had been used to mint the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition medals. Thomas Stokes purchased the press from Scaife in 1857. The press was scrapped in the 1930s.
Description of Content


Importer: Reginald Scaife - Kangaroo Office, Melbourne, Greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1853

User: Kangaroo Office (Mint), Australia, 1853-1856

User: Stokes (Mint), Melbourne, Greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1857-1873

User: Stokes & Martin, Melbourne, Greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1873-1893

User: Stokes & Sons, Caledonian Lane, Melbourne, Greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1893-1935

(see link for full summary)

The gold price as reported in the Argus 1st of the month
Oct 1 - 67.5s
Nov 1 - 68.5s
Dec 1 - 69.5s
Jan 1 - 70s
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/...88631/507910

Almost 6 months before the Kangaroo sails gold is 70s per ounce. The price is 'well stable".
Price ends up around 76s the day after the Kangaroo arrives.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/...98607/510527
The Kangaroo Office investor would need to be spending their days in some 'pot den' in Amsterdam for the next six months to not know. It is much, much, harder to believe they did not know than it is to believe they did know.
The narrative is what is not right..
Coinworks for example
"Towards the end of 1852 Taylor became aware that gold could be bought from diggers on the Ballarat fields at greatly reduced prices"
https://coinworks.com.au/Circa-1855...d-edge~20726
Did he really?
The price in the fields may have been marginally lower but just as the gold price was well known so too would have been that the banks were like vultures on a carcass; in the field buying it up. The Adelaide Assay Office book is clear the banks are all over it long before the end of 1852.

The really sad part for numismatics is people purporting the poor narrative are not overly keen to engage on why they have the narrative they have, who is their source. One reason for their silence, and I speculate, is that the product they peddle for big money (big commission) relies on the colorful false narrative
That is what makes it hard to track down the origin of the nonsense.
We can find Vaux and his effort but the embellished Kangaroo Office story is a more challenging task to source.

It is W E Roth who starts the current narrative we see so many parrot.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/...%20australia

"With the discovery and glut of gold in the early fifties a distinct epoch was marked in Australasian economic history. Fortunately there are still some interesting relics extant of these momentous years, such as the Adelaide ingots and tokens (which are referred to in the section dealing with local gold coinage); but the most noteworthy are certainly the gold pieces issued from the Kangaroo Office. The following notes relative to theses specimens, now published for the first time, have been gathered from a personal interview with Mr Reginald Scaife the manager of the office in question whom I called upon during my last visit to England some three years ago.
At the end of 1852 or the beginning of 1853 news reached the old country that Ballarat gold was selling on the field for £2 15s per ounce. The idea of the promoters, Messrs Hodgkin, Taylor and Tyndall was to open a large store in Melbourne and issue over the counter pieces of 2, 1, ½ and ¼ oz gold that should pass at current values of 8, 4, 2 and £1 respectively. With this object in view a fully rigged ship of 600 tons, the Kangaroo, was chartered and in her was forwarded an abundant supply of stores of various descriptions. She arrived in Hobson's Bay on October 23rd 1853. Messrs Scaife and Morgan Brown, the later now deceased, were sent out as managers and in their charge were places the dies for the gold pieces all of which had been designed and executed by W J Taylor the late head of the present celebrated London firm of die sinkers. In Melbourne however owing to delays of various kinds, no machinery for stamping the coins could be set up for quite 6 months by which time there was a glut of English sovereigns in the colonial market and the value of the precious metal rose to £4 4s an ounce.. When therefore everything was in readiness and the managers thoroughly prepared to execute orders on profit was to be found in issuing a one-ounce gold piece for £4. The whole affair thus speedily collapsed.."
A Numismatic History of Australia - The Queenslander, 27 July 1895.

Where to start?
I guess a good place is the claim gold, late '52, early '53 was being sold for 55s.
The gold price as reported in the Argus;
Oct 1 1852 - 67.5s
Nov 1 1852 - 68.5s
Dec 1 1852 - 69.5s
Jan 1 1853 - 70s
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/88631/507910

Hard to believe people were selling gold for 55s. Hard to believe that prior to June 1853 (departure date) the entrepreneurs did not know the real price.
We could then move to the alleged gold price when the Kangaroo Office opened its door. Allegedly 84s
Again we look to the Argus daily report on the price.
April 1 1854 - 78 s
May 2 1854 - 79s
June 1 1854 - 79s 6d
July 1 1854 - 79s 6d

I doubt it was being sold 55s and it was never 84s.
I will also add some narratives claim the gold price moved markedly between arrival and opening; that is just not true.
If these are notes from talking to Scaife then Scaife is mistaken.
The idea that entrepreneurs saw a price in late 1852 (maybe early 1853), locked it in and never reviewed it is somewhat laughable. The numbers Roth espouses are not even close to what is occurring and what is occurring is what would determine outlaying the alleged £13000, if that number is even accurate.

The glut of sovereigns did not occur during the 6 months between arrival and opening, the glut was before the Kangaroo left and even before the start of 1853. The glut was a response to the affairs in Adelaide and occurred during mid to late 1852.

The claim these pieces are the "most noteworthy", "relics", in "Australasian economic history" is just bizarre. For a handful of bullion rounds that had no sales to be talked up to such an extent is just expressive embellishment.

For mine the Argus of the 26 Oct 1853 reports the Kangaroo as arriving on the 25th, not the 23rd. The number is hard to read but the format of the paper would make it the 25th.

It is curious the Scaife letter of Sept 9 1854 talks of the "Gold Business" being unfunded.
"With reference to the "Gold Business" in a private letter I wrote to P Tinsdall Jr. I mentioned that I had no objection to prosecute the scheme subject to being
supplied with funds. He replied to my request for a remittance of £1000 made after my arrival, by saying "Such a thing was never contemplated"

If the plan is as Roth asserts, based on notes from talking to Scaife, then it is a hideous oversight of the entrepreneurs not to have funded the objective of the whole venture.
It can't be true the plan was to make gold rounds and sell them and then not put up the money to make that happen.

I would also argue Hodgkin's is not the type to be involved with this type of profiteering.

Reading the W. Roth first published account reveals where the standard narrative we find on modern websites comes from. Roth's account is very questionable.
The numbers do not add up, the motive seems unlikely given what Scaife writes 9th Sept, it isn't Hodgkin's style to profiteer and the embellishment is very clear.

Also, now we have seen the stamping press deed we know the 'Taylors project' narrative is not accurate.

After the 1864 Vaux introduction and the 1895 Roth first published account we see a bullion round that attracted no interest at the time of production go from curios exhibition memento to coin legend.

Numismatics is somewhat about what one can make people believe.

Just over a year since opening the Kangaroo Office.
Scaife is selling the equipment. 27th of August 1855.
The Victoria Museum say Stokes doesn't buy it until 1857.
AND
Given the time to communicate with the investors who makes this decision?
The Exhibition ended Dec 1854.
Scaife is only leasing the equipment, it is not his to sell.
It is possible, time-wise, that as the Exhibition winds up and as nobody has bought any of the gold rounds Scaife lets the investors know the Gold Business has no prospect because nobody wants or needs gold rounds and the investors reply sell up. That somewhat discounts that tokens and medals are a viable proposition.
It appears that whatever transpired that it was clear very quickly that the Gold Business was dead in the water.
There was no want or need for the rounds.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/...hTerm=scaife



Even before the ad Scaife was declining work in April of '55 on the plan to return the 'machinery' to London.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/...hTerm=scaife


Seems the plan changed to sell rather than return but considering the communication time with the investors; when was the decision made to wind up the 'gold business'.
Scaife would have been competing with Payne, formerly of the Assay Office, for work by the looks of it.

One thing that is notable after a few hundred reference to Scaife in the Argus is the circle he moves in and the matters he is involved with.
No wonder he is bored with the store.