It may not be in mint condition, but this Holey Dollar has seen some things.
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That's why the National Museum recently paid almost $130,000 to add the coin - an example of Australia's earliest minted currency and dating back to 1814 - to its collection.
Senior curator Kirsten Wehner said while the museum had been on the lookout for an example of the distinctive coins, this one appealed because it had obviously been in use as currency in the early days of the NSW colony.
''It was in very good condition, so we could see the design quite well ... [$129,315] is actually quite a good price,'' she said yesterday.
''Over the past few years, there's been quite a lot of interest in Holey Dollars, particularly from specialist coin collectors, and they tend to value coins very much on their condition, so they actually like them to be almost uncirculated. The less circulated they are, the higher value they are, and they have sold up to around about the $450,000 mark. But we were very interested in one where you could still see the design very clearly, but also had some evidence of its life as a coin that had actually been used in the colony, and circulated and actually had a working life.''
The Holey Dollar has its genesis in 1812, when NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie, in an effort to keep coins within the colony, imported 40,000 Spanish silver dollars to address the shortage. To double the number of coins in circulation, he commissioned a convicted forger named William Henshall to cut the centre out of each coin.
The outer ring became known as the ''holey dollar'' and was worth 5 shillings, and the centre was called the ''dump'', worth 15 pence.
The distinctive shape - not to mention the fact that Henshall famously incorporated his own initial, ''H'', into the spray of leaves in the counterstamp design, as well as between ''fifteen'' and ''pence'' on the dump - meant the coins were distinguished as belonging to the colony.
From 1822 onwards, the colony began recalling the Holey Dollars and dumps, and replacing them with sterling coinage, and by 1829, the Holey Dollar was demonetised, with most of the 40,000 coins in circulation exchanged for legal tender and melted down into bullion.
Ms Wehner said experts estimated that about 300 Holey Dollars and just over 1000 dumps remained today. She said the museum was on the lookout for a stellar example of the dump.