2 Dollars - Elizabeth II 4th Portrait - Aboriginal Man, Gold Proof

The Aboriginal elder design on Australia's two-dollar coin was the work of Horst Hahne, selected through a public competition held in 1984 ahead of the coin's 1988 introduction — the bicentenary year of European settlement, a date that made the choice of subject quietly pointed. Gold proof versions of circulating designs occupy an odd corner of the collector market: the underlying type struck in base metal by the billions, the precious-metal version existing solely for completionists and year-set builders.

KM#401b spans nearly two decades of issue under the fourth Raphael Maklouf-to-Ian Rank-Broadley portrait transition years, with individual annual mintages typically in the low thousands.