1966 Perth Mint 1 Cent Challenge - Do You Really Have One ?

another example of a wrong description of the 1966 Australian one cent mint marks online

Nice one Trigger - its looks to be a Melbourne ( slightly blurry trying to photograph these little guys without a digital microscope) .

It is probably the hardest mint mark out of any Australian decimal coin ever produced to pick with the naked eye .

I have looked at my 1c coins in the hope of identifying the different mints. Unfortunately for the life of me I can't tell the difference between any of them which is frustrating.
Anyway, if the mints have deliberately made alterations to the dies to differentiate between them, why did they make the differences so subtle?
I am keen to collect a full set of all the different varieties of circulating decimal coins so I would really like to be able to positively identify the different mints. The same thing applies to 2c and 5c coins.
I have even bought a few coins from dealers who claimed that the coins were either London or Melbourne minted but they look to me to be the same as all the others I have.
Any suggestions please?

Also - not sure of you location- but if you in the east you most likely looking at Melb & RAM as the smaller run of coins was, in my understanding, minted for WA requirements. So not many made it over unless in the pockets of those having a holiday .

Very informative thread Perthite.

Unfortunately all my 1966 1c failed the challenge

I have always assumed that the main reason why decimal coinage used this "privy mark" system, rather than overt mintmarks (like a little "M" for Melbourne) was for PR reasons.

The government went to great expense and fanfare to open the Mint in Canberra in 1965, touting it as Australia finally achieving full coinage self-sufficiency from Britain. But it turned out the new mint didn't have anywhere near the capacity to produce enough new decimal coins of all denominations in time for C-Day. They needed help from The Royal Mint, both from the branches in Australia and from London. But there was no need to shove it in everyone's face that the new mint wasn't big enough or fast enough - so the mintmarks were well hidden. But the coins still needed to be marked, obviously enough to those who knew what to look for, for quality control purposes, in case substandard coins from a specific mint started turning up in bulk quantities.

I don't think even the coin collectors figured out the privy mark thing until several years after the coins were in circulation. All the attention of collectors in the late 1960s was still on the rapidly-disappearing predecimal coins

But once we realised that different mints had in fact been used for 1966 coinage, we started looking for possible mintmarks. We were already used to "hidden mintmarks" in the sense of that roving "dot" on predecimal Perth-struck coins. I doubt anyone other than an avid coin collector in the 1950s and early 1960s would have even noticed that dot on their pennies and halfpennies, let alone been able to tell you what the dot meant. So the decimal privy marks essentially continued this tradition of subtlety. I don't think anyone in government at the time ever officially acknowledged that the "privy marks" were real mintmarks, or that our interpretations of them were correct.

Thanks Sap for your wisdom on this one,, I did not account for the prestige/pride factor ! That makes sense though . I wonder who coined the term "blunt" then if not the mint ?

Thanks Perthite. I was thinking number 1, maybe 4.
Number 1 is in terrible condition. Might have to get me one of those scopes.