In Need Of Coin Identification | "Trenchart" Florin

Yep. That's the "slightly wrong" Australian coat of arms, used on the Australian florin (2 shilling coin) from 1938 to 1963. An un-mutilated one looks like this.

The design was in use during WWII, so it could be a piece of "trench art". But with no date, there's no way to tell.

The official Australian coat of arms at the time was the same as the current one, which was adopted in 1912. George Kruger Gray, the designer of this coin (and of the George VI coinage of Britain, Canada and just about everywhere else in the Empire) apparently was either unaware of what our coat of arms actually looked like, or thought he could improve on it and indulged in a bit of artistic license.

The arms are supposed to be topped with a crest comprising a seven-pointed Star of Federation and wreath, not a crown. While we've generally been big fans of the monarchy, a crown has never featured prominently on the official arms like that.

Unlike the old 1908 coat of arms that appeared on the Edward VII and George V coinage, the 1912 arms isn't supposed to have a "mound of grass" the animals and shield stand on.

The symbol for South Australia on the shield, in the lower leftmost quadrant, is wrong; according to the Australian grant of arms in 1912, it's supposed to be the state bird, the piping shrike. The sun-and-three-wheat-sheaves symbol used here on the florin was derived from the arms of the state at the time, which were granted in 1936.

Some are nitpicky points, I realise, but coinage is one place where you're expected to get the heraldry and national symbolism right. But Australia has not made a very good show of accurately depicting the coat of arms on it's coinage. The original arms were changed shortly after the coinage was released, the arms on the George VI florin were wrong, and even the one that appears on the 1966 50 cents is slightly wrong (that coin has grass in the background; the usual background is wattle flowers - at least Kruger Gray got that part right). It wasn't until 2001 that a heraldically correct Australian coat of arms appeared on an Australian coin. In contrast, the arms appearing on our banknotes have always been technically accurate, even if the one on our dollar note had an "aboriginal interpretation" of the animals.