Getting Good Grades In Predecimal Coins

Combination of things, alot more american coins were minted and they also sold alot more proofs, moreover, coin collecting in the US started alot earlier, coin collecting in Australia only started to get serious in the 1950's. It is fair to say when coin collecting really started to gain some sort of attention that alot of people looked through their change and only found pretty poor condition coins pre-1936 (think today, how many UNC 1969 20c coins do you find in circulation......).

This combined with the lower mintages also means that there are fewer high quality examples of each year (maybe 1911 aside, because that was our first year of full currency alot of people saved examples from this year, hence why there are alot more Ch-UNC and GEM 1911 pennies than 1912 or 1913 for example).

Another factor surely has to be the design, Australian coins in my opinion are some of the most attractive in the world, so they appeal to local and many international collectors.

When you say really good grades do you mean aUNC+ or do you include EF. I would suspect it is harder to find silver in high grades as they were higher denominations and too expensive for the average man to simply have laying around in a coin collection. I've spent a bit of time looking at some of the American coins in other topics and cant believe how nice they are, especially when theyre often much older than our examples.

my guess would be that,90% of the coins put away when new, where at some stage needed to be spent. and each time they where spent, they where damaged a little more, some where found by collectors and put back away but with marks. the other 10% who knows, could be buried in your backyard, or in your uncles chimney in a tin.
which would account for the high prices of the best examples and large amount with minor marks.
just my thoughts

A couple of reasons:

- There weren't many collectors in the early years so very few coins were individually hoarded, a good percentage of the individually hoarded coins came from overseas (e.g. visiting tourists taking home a shiny souvenir).
- There weren't many Australian dealers in the day so most of the early hoards were from overseas dealers (e.g. Baldwins).
- Collecting in Australia didn't really take off until the late 1970s
- The few coins that did survive have since been harshly cleaned as Australia never really got the idea of originality until recently (even today some dealers still clean their coins).

Btw the 1911 pennies were mostly from Baldwin's hoard.

Yes, very nice coins enworb, I wish mine were as good as yours. So does anyone know what grade these would be and a rough idea what they'd be worth..yes I know they're rough so I've taken that into account Cheers

The 1914H is the lower mintage of the 1914. I would grade it at F but very hard to see how much detail is in crown. Maccas has 14H in F at $22.

The 1915 looks to be about VG. I cant see any detail in the band of the crown from the photo. Even in VG maccas has $65 on it.

The 1915 goes up heaps with grade - quite a hard coin to get in higher grade.

Erkle - If you dont want to fork out cash for a new book like me then go to your local library. I've had my 2011 maccas on loan the entire year and the year before I had the 2010 for just as long. Not too much interest from the rest of the community for that book I dont think. Its saved me 60 odd dollars the past two years.

I agree that Australian coins and notes seem way over priced when compared to similar coins and notes in England, New Zealand and the US.

I put this down to Australia's rapidly growing population. In 1910 there were just 4.5 million people. That has climbed to 21 million today. That is more than 5x increase and results in low mintages in the early years.

As for the condition of the coins, I don't think many collections would have survived the Great Depression and collecting coins only became a common hobby after WW2.