10 Dollars - Elizabeth II Willis Island

Willis Island — officially Île Willis — is Australia's only staffed meteorological station in the Coral Sea, a remote outcrop that has hosted a Bureau of Meteorology facility since 1921. Its strategic value became grimly apparent in May 1942 when a Japanese submarine shelled the station, making it one of the few Australian-administered territories to come under direct enemy fire during the Second World War. The garrison was evacuated; the weather data it had been collecting was considered vital enough that operations resumed almost immediately after the threat passed.

The pad-printing technique used here applies colour directly onto the coin face rather than through enamel inlay — a cost-driven process increasingly adopted for collector issues in this period.