20 Pounds Australian and European Bank

The Australian and European Bank was a short-lived colonial venture, chartered in London and operating branches in New South Wales and Victoria through the 1870s. It never achieved the scale its promoters envisioned, and the bank was wound up before the decade closed — making any surviving note from this series genuinely scarce by simple arithmetic: few were printed, fewer circulated long enough to survive.

Bradbury Wilkinson, then still building the reputation they would carry into the twentieth century, handled the printing at their London works. The twenty-pound denomination was rarely held by ordinary depositors; at that value in colonial Australia, this was commercial paper — pastoral accounts, merchant settlements, interbank clearing.