Auction 69 Highlights

Welcome to Sale 69.

This sale follows no great theme and so has a little bit of this and a little bit of that. There is a run of collectables associated with Australia’s iconic airline ‘QANTAS’ a few very personal ‘Playboy’ souvenirs and a ‘secret’ lapel pin which parted the goons and gained your personal access to Frank Sinatra.

For investors there are also two very desirable ‘Specimen’ banknote sets of the ‘Bank of New Zealand. The first is an uncirculated set of 6 notes £1 to £100 from the printer’s archives of Bradbury Wilkinson. These notes circulated in the late 1800s and feature a European perspective of New Zealand with utopic cameos of proud natives, volcanoes, palm fronds and the ubiquitous kiwis. The second set covers the period 1924 to 1931 and, unlike the banknotes of other colonial outposts of the era which largely sported effigies of the reigning monarch, the Bank of New Zealand opted to honour its first nation peoples. The set of 7 notes from 10/- to £100 feature a bold design of a Maori covered in full facial tattoos.

We also have on offer perhaps Australia’s most intriguing coin, the 1916 ‘Mule’ Halfpenny. In nature a ‘mule’ is the result of the sterile pairing of a donkey and a horse while in numismatics it relates to the product of two dies that should never have combined. This happened in 1916 at the Calcutta Mint when an obverse of the Indian coin was mistakenly paired with a reverse of an Australian coin producing a small number of ‘mule’ halfpennies. It is the coin that most collectors can never own, and while it’s late discovery in 1965 was met with some initial scepticism by the ‘coin experts’ it is now accepted as a genuine mint error that has only survived in single digit numbers. The coin in our sale is graded PCGS XF45 and is the highest third-party graded example and on our estimation the second finest known.

There is also a small selection of desirable Australian and World coins on offer for those on a more modest budget as well as a mixture of other interesting collectables.

Happy bidding

Smalls Auctions.