5 Cents

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands plastic coinage of 1968 was issued under the authority of John Clunies-Ross, whose family had governed the atoll as a private fiefdom since the 1820s. The tokens functioned as a closed-currency system on the plantation, paid to Cocos Malay workers and redeemable only at the family-controlled store — a monetary arrangement that effectively trapped labor on the island and was later cited by the Australian government as a form of economic coercion when it moved to formally annex the territory in 1978.