Untamed Landscapes: Ross MacDiarmid’s new coin series for investors and collectors

The former boss of the Royal Australian Mint predicts coins could be out of circulation as soon as 2030. But for canny investors, they could be worth more than ever.

Ross MacDiarmid, front, during his time as CEO of the Royal Australian Mint, celebrating the release of the AC/DC series. Picture: Sean Davey

In January 2020, towards the end of your ten years as CEO of the Royal Australian Mint – the government’s coin factory – you predicted the “graceful death” of 5c and 10c coins within a decade. Since the pandemic, contactless payment has become the norm. How do you now see the future of cash? Around the world, demand for circulating coins – and notes – is collapsing dramatically. But there are circumstances that encourage their continued use: in hard economic times, people need cash; a lot of migrants and the elderly like to use it; and when there’s a sudden outage it’s the only way to make transactions. But I think after 2030, if there are still coins around, they will be very few in number.

MacDiarmid in coroprate mode. Picture: Anthony Oh

You grew the Royal Australian Mint’s commercial operations from $25 million a year to over $100 million. How, and why? We started providing coins for half a dozen Pacific Island countries, which had previously bought them elsewhere. We also made you might call investment coins – limited mintage series in silver or gold. And we created special collections, like the coins celebrating AC/DC, that were sold through Woolies and Australia Post; they were incredibly successful. We did all this because we recognised that as the demand for circulating coins was going south, we needed to ensure the organisation remained viable.

As a consultant to ABC Mint, a maker of commemorative coins and bullion in Sydney’s Marrickville, you’ve overseen the creation of its new collection Untamed Landscapes. Tell us about it. It’s a series of five coins featuring the fauna of the Pacific region – the kangaroo, crocodile, kiwi, thorny lizard and sailfish. I worked with a coin designer, and also sourced the effigy of King Charles from the New Zealand territory of Tokelau, for which we had to pay a royalty.

The sailfish coin from Untamed Landscapes

The one-ounce coins, made of 99.99% pure silver, have a face value of NZ$5 but the metal in them is worth about $47. How much do they cost to buy? It varies over time, based on the price of silver; it’s the metal value plus a margin. You can buy the Untamed Landscapes coins singly, but ABC Mint expects people to buy them in bulk, as an investment; they’re available in rolls of 25, and in “Monster Boxes” of 500 (priced about $29,000 at the time of going to press). The series has a limited mintage, so that attracts the interest of collectors as well as investors.

The Royal Australian Mint has made 15 billion coins since the introduction of decimal in 1966, and 4 billion remain incirculation. What happened to the other 11 billion? They’redown the back of couches, in landfill and in fountains around the world. And they’re in jars in people’s houses; we’ve all got them, including me. Many coins have been destroyed in bushfires, too; the intense heat turns them into a molten mess.

Clipped planchet, broadstrike, die clash, brockage … what did those terms mean to you as boss of the Mint? They’re all types of error in the coin-making process. Errors damage the credibility of the Mint, so we had lots of quality control measures in place. If they get into circulation, they always attract a huge amount of interest from collectors. It’s the only business I can think of where errors attract a premium.

Australia’s new coins bear the effigy of King Charles. Why does he face left, while his mum faced right? And why isn’t he wearing a crown? It has long been tradition with coins that successive monarchs face different ways. And the lack of a crown is entirely his decision. I think it’s an indication that he didn’t want to be too kingly looking – he wanted to look much more like a man of the people.