20 Pounds Bank of New South Wales

The Bank of New South Wales was among the oldest and most powerful of the Australian colonial trading banks, and its higher-denomination notes like this one functioned primarily as interbank settlement instruments rather than circulating currency — twenty pounds was well above what most working colonists handled in a month. Perkins, Bacon & Petch, the London security printers behind a remarkable proportion of nineteenth-century British colonial banknote production, supplied the printed sheets to Sydney, where dates and serial numbers were completed locally before issue.

The two-decade span of this type reflects how infrequently the bank bothered to redesign a note that saw little street-level wear.