10 Pounds National Bank

The National Bank Limited was an Australian trading bank, not a central bank, yet it issued its own banknotes under the pre-Federation and early Commonwealth arrangements that permitted private banks to circulate paper currency. By the late 1920s, that privilege was running out. The Commonwealth Bank had been steadily consolidating note issue authority, and the 1910 Australian Notes Act had already imposed a prohibitive tax on private bank notes in circulation — effectively strangling the practice for most issuers well before this series appeared.

That this note was still being dated into the early 1930s makes it a genuine outlier. The National Bank itself was absorbed into the Colonial-National merger that eventually formed the National Bank of Australasia, and surviving high-denomination examples from this final window are correspondingly scarce.