1 Penny - Day and Mieville Dunedin

Day & Mieville were general merchants operating in Dunedin during Otago's gold rush years, and like dozens of other provincial traders they commissioned token coinage to address the chronic shortage of small change that plagued New Zealand's colonial economy throughout the 1850s. The British government was slow to supply official copper to the colonies, leaving merchants to fill the gap themselves — tokens of this kind circulated with broad local acceptance, if no legal authority.

This piece was struck in Birmingham, almost certainly by the Heaton Mint, which supplied the majority of New Zealand's merchant token issues during this period.