During the first decades of European settlement in New South Wales, money was in short supply. Ships brought in a variety of coins from around the world, but exchange rates were haphazard and the coins tended to leave as quickly as they arrived. A barter economy prevailed, with rum being the most popular medium of exchange.
In 1812 Governor Lachlan Macquarie took the first steps to establish a local currency when he had holes punched in a shipload of Spanish dollars to discourage them from being taken out of the colony, creating the ‘holey dollar’.
Real financial security came only when Macquarie established the colony’s first bank, the Bank of New South Wales. Our first treasure is one of colony’s first banknotes, issued on 8 April 1817, the first day of the bank’s operation. A rare example of the first paper currency issued in New South Wales, the banknote is a symbol of the establishment of economic order in the fledgling colony.
Beside the banknote is another, more lustrous symbol of the colony’s growing prosperity. The Maitland Bar Gold Nugget was found in 1887, towards the end of the Gold Rush that brought a great deal of wealth to New South Wales. Weighing in at 10.7 kg, it is one of the purest gold nuggets in the world and the only remaining example of a large gold nugget from the New South Wales Gold Rush.
The Maitland Bar was discovered by three miners in the bottom of a disused mineshaft at Meroo Creek near Gulgong. It was bought by the colonial government and displayed in national and international expositions in a demonstration of the colony’s wealth and a bid to bring settlers to the country. It disappeared in the 1930s, only to resurface in a box that Treasury officers had unwittingly used as a set of makeshift cricket stumps.