1 Penny - J. Hosie - Vines Melbourne, Victoria

Hosie's token was struck in the ferment of Melbourne's post-gold-rush commercial boom, when the colonial government's chronic shortage of small change left private traders to fill the gap themselves. J. Hosie operated a vines and produce business, and like dozens of Melbourne merchants in the early 1860s, commissioned tradesman's tokens from one of the British die-sinkers supplying the Australian market — most likely Heaton's of Birmingham, which handled the bulk of Victorian copper token production during this period.

The Andrews and Rarity references place this piece among the documented but genuinely scarce survivors of that short-lived private coinage experiment, which effectively ended when Queensland and then Victoria moved to suppress merchant tokens by the mid-1860s.