1 Penny - T. Butterworth and Co. Castlemaine, Victoria

Castlemaine sat at the center of the Mount Alexander goldfields, and by the late 1850s its population had swelled and then contracted with brutal speed as alluvial gold gave out. T. Butterworth & Co. issued this token during that awkward transitional period, when the colonial economy was liquid enough to need small change but the official copper supply from Britain remained chronically inadequate for day-to-day retail transactions. Private tradesmen across Victoria filled the gap themselves.

Andrews#54 is among the more straightforwardly attributed of the Victorian merchant tokens — no known mule varieties complicate the picture here, which is not true of several contemporaneous Castlemaine issues.