Banknote History

History of Australian Banknotes: Pre-Decimal Pounds, Decimal 1966, and the World's First Polymer Note (1988)

Australia had no national paper money until 1913, and seventy-five years later it gave the world the plastic banknote. In between sit Fisher's Flimsies, a currency that was almost called the Royal, and a Depression-era series that put working people on the money.

First national note, 1913 Pounds until 14 February 1966 Polymer world first, 1988 Printed at Craigieburn since 1981

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Last updated: September 2026

What money did Australia use before 1913?

Before 1913 Australians spent coin, private bank notes and, in one state, government notes. The discovery of gold in 1851 brought Australian gold coinage and a rush of new banks, each issuing its own paper backed by gold. The Queensland Treasury issued its own notes and barred private banks in the state from issuing theirs.

Confidence in that arrangement was fragile. The Reserve Bank records that people were often wary of private bank notes, particularly after the wave of bank failures in 1893. Parliament settled the question in 1910 with two statutes. The Australian Notes Act assigned note issue to the Commonwealth Treasury and withdrew the status of state-issued notes, while the Bank Notes Tax Act imposed a tax of 10 per cent a year on notes issued by private banks, which ended private issue in practice (Reserve Bank of Australia).

The Treasury was not ready to print. As a stopgap the government bought notes from the private banks and from the Queensland Government and overprinted, or superscribed, them with the words AUSTRALIAN NOTE Payable in Gold Coin at the Commonwealth Treasury at the seat of Government. Those superscribed notes were the first paper money accepted right across Australia. They were meant to be withdrawn as soon as proper notes appeared, but the currency shortage that followed the outbreak of war in 1914 kept them in circulation (RBA Museum). The vague phrase seat of government reflected the fact that Melbourne was the temporary capital, the name Canberra was not chosen until 1913, and Parliament did not move there until 1927.

What was Australia's first banknote?

Australia's first national banknote was a ten shillings note, ready for numbering on 1 May 1913. It was printed at a works near the western end of Flinders Street in Melbourne by Thomas Samuel Harrison, an English security printer appointed Australia's first banknote printer in 1912 after a year spent buying machinery and setting up the plant.

The first series ran to eight denominations and was issued across two years: ten shillings in May 1913, the £1 and £5 in September 1913, the £10 in October 1913, the £100 in February 1914, the £50 in April 1914, the £20 in June 1914, and a £1,000 note first printed in 1914. Each was printed in intaglio over a letterpress background, and each carried the promise that the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia would pay the bearer in gold coin on demand at the Commonwealth Treasury. The notes were signed by the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary of the Commonwealth Treasury and imprinted at the bottom centre with the words T. S. Harrison, Australian Note Printer (RBA Museum).

The backs are the reason this series is called Australian Panorama, and they are unusually specific. The ten shillings shows the Goulburn Irrigation Weir in Victoria. The £1 shows gold miners working roughly 1.2 kilometres underground at the Victoria Quartz Mine in Bendigo, then the deepest gold mine in the world; the three men at the centre are W. Healey, F. Smith and J. Beveridge, drawn from a photograph by William Vincent Kelly. The £5 shows the Hawkesbury River near Brooklyn in New South Wales. The £10 shows wagons carrying wheat to Narwonah railway station in 1909, a record harvest year. The £20 shows axemen felling a blue gum on Bruny Island in Tasmania, and the £50 shows Merino sheep at Bungaree in South Australia.

Why were the first Australian notes called Fisher's Flimsies?

Because the fine linen paper wore out fast, and because the new currency was political. Newspapers ridiculed the notes as Fisher's Flimsies, a jab at Prime Minister Andrew Fisher and his enthusiasm for a government note issue. Members of the Commonwealth Liberal Party had opposed the series, partly over the profits private banks stood to lose.

Australians were not used to paper at all. In the early 1900s nearly 90 per cent of Australian currency was coin, and to make the point that the ten shillings note stood in for a half sovereign it was overprinted in red with the words Half Sovereign from 1914. The most-handled note in the country was also widely suspected of carrying disease. What finally settled the argument was inflation during the First World War, which pushed more paper into circulation and made it ordinary (RBA Museum).

Two wartime notes are collector curiosities. A brightly coloured emergency £1, known informally as the Rainbow Note, was introduced in 1914 because currency had become scarce; printed quickly and with no security features, it was counterfeited almost at once and withdrawn from April 1915. A five shillings note carrying a portrait of King George V was prepared in 1916, in case silver coin became more valuable than its face value, and would have been the first Australian note to show the British monarch. The silver threat passed and the note was never issued. Both episodes belong to the wider story told in the history of counterfeiting.

Who has issued and printed Australia's banknotes?

Five bodies in turn: the Commonwealth Treasury from 1910, a Notes Board from 1920, the Board of the Commonwealth Bank from 1924, the Commonwealth Bank as sole issuer from 1945, and the Reserve Bank of Australia from 1960. Printing moved from Melbourne to Fitzroy in 1924 and to Craigieburn in 1981.

The Notes Board was created in 1920 with four members appointed by the Commonwealth Government, chaired ex officio by the Governor of the Commonwealth Bank, while the day-to-day administration of the note issue passed to a special department of the bank. The Reserve Bank Museum holds Milton Kent's photograph of the Board's first meeting on 17 December 1920, showing Charles Cerutty, John Joseph Garvan, the chairman Sir Denison Miller, the secretary Hugh Traill Armitage and George Swinburne. In 1924 a Commonwealth Bank Board was established and the note issue passed to it. The Commonwealth Bank Act of 1945 made that bank the sole issuer, and the Reserve Bank Act 1959 transferred the role to the Reserve Bank, which began operations on 14 January 1960 under its first Governor, Dr H. C. Coombs (RBA Museum).

Printing kept moving to keep up. Harrison's Flinders Street works gave way to a larger establishment in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy commissioned in 1924. By the early 1970s Fitzroy was too small, and the Reserve Bank built a new complex at Craigieburn, 25 kilometres north of Melbourne, where production began in October 1981. The Note Printing Branch was renamed Note Printing Australia in 1990 and incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reserve Bank in 1998.

How did the pound notes change between 1923 and 1961?

Four pound-note families followed the first series. The Harrison series of 1923 to 1925 brought the monarch onto Australian money. Two Depression and wartime series followed in 1933 to 1934 and 1938 to 1940. A 1953 to 1954 series put historical figures on the notes for the first time, and a final Reserve Bank series appeared in 1960 and 1961.

King George V appears in profile on the half sovereign, or ten shillings, note first issued in September 1923, the first monarch portrayed on an Australian banknote. The decision followed advice from the printers for British India, whose inquiry into banknote printing had found that portraiture made counterfeiting harder. The £1 of June 1923 replaced the Bendigo mine scene with a reproduction of E. Phillips Fox's 1902 oil painting Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770. The £5 followed in March 1924 and the £10 in May 1925, all printed in intaglio over letterpress on paper carrying a full basket-weave watermark (RBA Museum). The technique behind that raised print is explained in the guide to intaglio banknote engraving.

The 1930s changed both the money and the design brief. Australia left the gold standard in 1932, and the Commonwealth Bank Act of that year made the notes no longer convertible into gold. The series issued between 1933 and 1934 kept the coat of arms and the portrait of George V but replaced the landscapes with vignettes of people at work, drawn by Frank Manley, representing manufacturing and commerce. The Reserve Bank Museum reads that as an optimistic choice during severe unemployment. The same vignettes were reprinted between 1938 and 1940 with the portrait of King George VI. More than a decade later, the series of 1953 and 1954 became the first Australian notes to portray identities from the country's history, and the selection favoured colonial navigators and explorers over early prime ministers; Arthur Phillip appears on the £10 first issued in June 1954 (RBA Museum).

The last pound notes are the ones most collectors meet first. The Reserve Bank issue of 1960 and 1961 carries Matthew Flinders on the ten shillings with Old Parliament House in Canberra on the back, Queen Elizabeth II on the £1 with Charles Sturt and Hamilton Hume on the back, and Arthur Phillip on the £10 with symbols of science and industry. The ten shillings, £1 and £10 all use a Captain James Cook watermark and carry the signatures of H. C. Coombs as Governor of the Reserve Bank and R. Wilson (PMG World Paper Money Price Guide). Watermarks as a security device are covered in the history of banknote watermarks.

How did Australia change to decimal currency in 1966?

The Menzies government announced in 1963 that Australia would adopt decimal currency in 1966, set up a Decimal Currency Board to run the conversion, and gave the Reserve Bank responsibility for producing the notes. The changeover happened on 14 February 1966 at a rate of two dollars to the pound, with ten shillings becoming one dollar.

The new unit was nearly called the Royal. A public competition for a name drew close to a thousand suggestions, from Austral, Crown, Regal and Tasman to Goanna, Magpie, Schooner, Phar Lap and Ned Kelly. Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced in June 1963 that the unit would be the Royal, and the name was later dropped in favour of the dollar.

The design contest was just as competitive. Four Australian designers, Gordon Andrews, Richard Beck, Max Forbes and George Hamori, prepared preliminary designs under the guidance of the painter Russell Drysdale. The Bank required Queen Elizabeth II on the $1 and left the other subjects to the designers in consultation with it. Max Forbes's work was admired as beautiful and romantic, but Gordon Andrews was announced the winner in April 1964, and Alistair Morrison, chairman of the Design Committee, praised his designs for their freshness, originality and elegance. Detailed design work then went to the specialist firm Organisation Giori in Milan, and new printing machinery came from the United Kingdom (RBA Museum).

The Reserve Bank issued the $1, $2, $10 and $20 on the changeover, added the $5 in 1967, the $50 in 1973 and the $100 in 1984. The $1 note stopped being issued after the $1 coin arrived on 14 May 1984, and the $2 after the $2 coin arrived on 20 June 1988. Catalogue listings identify these notes by their signature pairs rather than by date, because the same design ran for years under successive officials: the 1969 printing of the $1 carries J. G. Phillips and R. J. Randall, and the 1972 printing of the $5 carries J. G. Phillips and F. H. Wheeler (PMG World Paper Money Price Guide). Notes with a star suffix in the serial number are the replacements described in the guide to star notes and replacement notes.

Why did Australia invent the polymer banknote?

Because the brand new decimal notes were counterfeited within months. The 1966 series carried a watermark, a metal thread, quality rag paper and sophisticated printing, yet by the end of that year the $10 note had been forged. The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr H. C. Coombs, went looking for a long-term answer among Australian scientists.

The Bank opened discussions with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Dr Sefton Hayman, then Chief of the CSIRO Division of Applied Chemistry, was in at the start, and Professor David Solomon led the research team through to the result. The goal was a note that could not be copied photographically and whose forgeries the public would spot easily, and that led the team to the optically variable device, an image that changes with the viewing angle (RBA Museum).

The answer arrived in January 1988 as a commemorative $10 note for the bicentenary, the world's first banknote printed on a polymer substrate. Its optically variable device carries a portrait of Captain James Cook worked from Nathaniel Dance's painting, and 1988 was also the year Australia became the first country to put optically variable devices on its money. The full conversion followed one denomination at a time between 1992 and 1996, the first complete polymer series anywhere. The Reserve Bank dates the first polymer $5, carrying a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II approved for banknote use in 1988, to 7 July 1992 (Reserve Bank of Australia). What the substrate changes for a collector is set out in the comparison of polymer and paper banknotes.

Australian banknote series at a glance

The table gathers every Australian issuing period with the denominations, the people and scenes on them, what they were printed on, and the signatures collectors use to tell printings apart.

Series, dates and imagery from the Reserve Bank of Australia and its Museum, read in September 2026. Signature pairs are given where the Reserve Bank or the PMG World Paper Money Price Guide names them.

What comes next for Australian banknotes?

A redesigned $5 note with no portrait at all. The Reserve Bank is replacing the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II with artwork celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and history, under a theme chosen from public nominations and called Connection to Country.

The Reserve Bank asked the public for a theme that would celebrate First Nations cultures and history, depict them authentically and respectfully, recognise the diversity of cultures across Australia and the Torres Strait, and respect cultural sensitivities about sacred or secret material. More than 2,100 submissions came in. The final choice was made by an Imagery Selection Panel of senior representatives of the Reserve Bank and Note Printing Australia together with prominent First Nations business and community members, and that panel continues to advise as the theme becomes an artwork and then a banknote design (Reserve Bank of Australia).

The current series is the benchmark it has to match. The Next Generation Banknote program was established in 2007 and the concept design came from emerystudio, whose creative director Garry Emery had designed the $20 of the earlier polymer series and the Centenary of Federation $5 of 2001. A Design Advisory Panel formed in 2011 included the historians Professor Grace Karskens and Professor Angela Woollacott and the industrial designer Professor John Redmond. The series keeps the people, colours, sizes and denominations of the notes it replaced, and adds a top-to-bottom clear window, a rolling colour effect, a reversing number inside a building image, and a tactile feature of raised bumps that runs from one bump on the $5 up to five on the $100 (RBA Museum).

Each denomination also carries its own bird and wattle: the Eastern Spinebill and Prickly Moses on the $5, and the Australian Masked Owl with Acacia pycnantha on the $100, which also keeps the portraits of Sir John Monash and Dame Nellie Melba and was released on 29 October 2020 (Reserve Bank of Australia). Four of the eight named Australians on the current notes are women, and Queen Elizabeth II makes a fifth woman on the series, which puts Australia well ahead of most issuers; see women on banknotes and animals on banknotes for how that compares. For values, grading and where to start a set, the Australia banknotes guide carries the collecting side.

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