1929 New Guinea Halfpenny And Penny: Proof And Business Strikes?

My source for the following material is the book "From Cowrie to Kina", the definitive guidebook of PNG numismatics,written by Bill Mira in 1986.


You have that backwards, I'm afraid: the entire mintage, except for 400 pairs, was destroyed. So the "effective mintage" for each coin is just 400.

Well, it's actually "405" for the halfpennies; when they did the stocktake, two of them were apparently missing from the box when the coins were finally returned to the Melbourne Mint in 1934. Presumably some bureaucrat back in New Guinea had pilfered them. Plus, the Mint also apparently sold three halfpennies as single coins.

And as far as I can tell, proof versions of these coins (in the conventional sense of the word "proof") were never struck.There's certainly no record of any proof dies being produced. Bill MIra illustrates a "proof 1929 halfpenny", but makes no other mention of their existence in the book. I suspect that the "400 released for collectors" does not include the various presentation pieces: eight of each denomination were made, and distributed to various officials for final approval - including the Administrator of New Guinea, who does not seem to have noticed at the time that the proposed new coins were of an inappropriate size. I don't think they recorded the fate of all of these presentation pieces, but I suspect they were kept by their recipients, and that these are the "proofs" that are recorded.


There is mention made in the book of numerous off-metal strikes, regarded as trial strikes. Most of these are copper, and there's one in silver; there's no mention of a pure nickel striking, and none of these off-metal trial strikes should have left the Mint.

Personally, I wouldn't trust PCGS to properly recognize and attribute New Guinea "proof" coins. The American TPGs have harmed their reputation in this country by designating the existence of "proofs" in the Australian predecimal series, for years when no such proofs were ever minted.

Well, no. 48,000 pennies were actually struck from the dies, and 24,000 halfpennies. They made them, then destroyed most of them. I don't think they'd have been particularly careful about choosing perfect, "first strike" or above-average examples when they picked out the 400 coin subsets, so long as they weren't obviously defective they probably would have passed. The eight presentation specimens would have been pristine and probably prooflike, assuming they were included in the total survivors.

As for die wear etc, it really depends how much trial and error had been undertaken, and whether they had sought and obtained advice from head office in London. As noted by the OP, Melbourne had never struck cupronickel coins before, so had no first-hand experience on the extra die wear caused by cupronickel, but by 1929 London had struck plenty of cupronickel coins for the other colonies.

Very much this - besides From Cowrie to Kina, I don't know of any decent reference book the coins of New Guinea: probably they're working from a copy of Krause which says proofs were struck (though on what basis who knows).

My 1983 Krause lists 1929 copper nickel proofs with no mintage and lists Nickel(OMS)(off metal strikes) proofs with a mintage of 20 each.