2 Dollars - Charles III 1st Portrait - Emu Utingat Silver Antiqued Coloured

The emu's taxonomic name, Dromaius novaehollandiae, was assigned by the French naturalist Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1816 — three decades after the bird had already become a practical problem for early colonial settlers, who found it nearly impossible to fence out of crops. The species later achieved a grimly comic footnote in military history when the Australian Army's 1932 campaign to cull overrunning emu populations in Western Australia was abandoned after soldiers expended thousands of rounds to negligible effect, an episode now routinely filed under "Major Peter Campbell's Emu War."

Charles III's effigy appearing here marks the first portrait transition for Australian coinage since Elizabeth II's death in September 2022.