1/2 Penny - R.S.Waterhouse Hobart, Tasmania

Robert Samuel Waterhouse operated a boot and shoe warehouse in Hobart during the 1860s, a period when small change was chronically short across the Australian colonies. Private traders routinely filled the gap by commissioning tradesman's tokens from British die-sinkers — overwhelmingly from the Birmingham firm of John Stanton, who struck the majority of Australian colonial copper tokens of this period. The Waterhouse piece is catalogued across all four major Australian token references, suggesting reasonably consistent survival, though the Hobart mercantile token series as a whole was rendered obsolete almost immediately by the imperial coinage reforms of 1863–64.