Birthday Gift #2: Cook Islands "Gallipoli" Dollar 2005

The Perth Mint is authorised to issue Australian legal tender coins, but makes coins for other countries too. So whenever their marketing department gets what it believes is a good idea for a commemorative coin to sell to Australians, but can't for whatever reason get the Australian Treasury department to authorize the issue, then they often get one of their "flag of convenience" countries to rubber-stamp the authorization, and go ahead and make the coins anyway. The Perth Mint website (and the sales catalogues from the major dealers) can often make it hard to tell which country actually issued a particular coin.

This coin is an excellent example. It's a Cook Islands $1 colourized silver coin commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings during WWI.

Now, the Gallipoli campaign holds special meaning for the Australian, New Zealand and Turkish peoples, but little meaning or relevance to anyone else. And I'm pretty sure there weren't any Cook Islanders involved in the battle, so it clearly wasn't intended for sale to the "locals".

Still, it's a nice gift, and not the sort of thing I'd buy myself. It fits in the collection a lot better than the usual socks and shirts, anyway.