1 Penny - Buxton J.W. Brisbane, Queensland

Buxton's stationery and fancy goods business operated on Queen Street, Brisbane, and issued these penny tokens during the chronic small-change shortage that plagued colonial Queensland in the 1850s and 1860s. The British Imperial penny was legal tender but simply wasn't arriving in sufficient quantity to meet the demands of retail trade, pushing merchants across the Australian colonies to commission their own copper pieces from manufacturers — mostly Heaton's Mint in Birmingham.

The Andrews, Renniks, and Gray references all catalogue this piece, suggesting it survived in enough examples to attract consistent collector attention from early Australian numismatic scholarship onward.