1 Dollar - Elizabeth II 4th Portrait - Air Series - Sacred Kingfisher

The Air Series was part of a broader Royal Australian Mint push in the early 2010s to use pad printing — a process borrowed from industrial plastics manufacturing — to apply color directly onto circulation-quality coin blanks. The Sacred Kingfisher, widespread across coastal and woodland Australia, was a practical choice for the technique: its teal and chestnut plumage gave the mint's colorization process something genuinely difficult to render in metal alone.

Pad-printed Australian dollars see considerable attrition in circulation as the color layer abrades with use, making problem-free examples harder to find than mintage figures suggest.