1 Dollar - Elizabeth II 4th Portrait - Shark Bay

Shark Bay, on the remote coastline of Western Australia, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1991 — one of only a handful of sites worldwide to meet all four natural criteria simultaneously. The pad-printing technique used here, applied over struck aluminium bronze blanks, was the Royal Australian Mint's solution to rendering fine colour detail on a circulating-format coin without resorting to a separate collector product. The process is unforgiving: ink adhesion on a convex metal surface degrades quickly in a pocket or till, meaning circulated examples lose their printed detail rapidly.