Identify Antique Chinese Coin Found In Australia?

Not a Chinese cash,
but a Chinese charm.
The pimples on the reverse are the diagnostic feature.

I will take it as said, that it was found in 1866, although there lots of modern Chinese cash coin / like charms.

Lots of Chinese came to Australian during the Gold Rush days, and the finding of these items in the old abandoned mining camps is not an extremely rare occurrence,
although the finding of cash coins would be less rare these days.

They are most often found by hobby metal detectorists, and mine site archeologists / historians.

to the Community!

Your post was moved to the appropriate forum for the proper attention.

The consensus appears to be that the initial two items that I found are not coins but rather Qing dynasty charms, based on the dimples on one side. Yesterday I found a spill of six more nearby to the original two, however the latest six are of two smaller sizes 20mm and 25mm diameter. The first two that I found are 30mm diameter. Can you tell me are they different "denominations", how old are they, and why would they be in the grounds of an 1866 Methodist church in Australia please?

This has all the earmarks of a site being "seeded" for some reason, akin to the nefarious practice of placing some decent precious metal bearing ore to be found in or around what is in fact a totally played out mine. The coins are absolutely very modern reproductions, possibly artificially aged (from the looks of them, maybe by being run through a fire) before being put there.

Here's what authentic 19th century and earlier buried cash coins ought to look more like:

Same reason I bought some Viking coins on ebay, then buried them in a beach in Maine...

Don't assume that someone buried these pieces purely as a practical joke on future metal detectorists. People sometimes do strange, seemingly-irrational things, particularly in the name of "ritual" or "custom". In this case, this is another possible reason "why".

Replica money, including coins such as these, is often burned in traditional Chinese funeral and ancestor-memorial practices, a custom that the Communist government in mainland China is trying to repress but which is still widely practiced in Chinese communities elsewhere in the world.

These old mining settlements typically have very few Chinese-descent people living nearby today, but perhaps someone of Chinese descent visited the area (in relatively recent times, as the replicas are indeed modern - no earlier than the 1970s) and held a ceremony there.