5 Dollars - Leonard I Abner Doubleday, Essai

Hutt River Province — formally the Province of Hutt River — was a self-declared micronation in Western Australia, established in 1970 when wheat farmer Leonard Casley seceded from Australia in a dispute over wheat production quotas. By 1992, Casley had long styled himself Prince Leonard I, issuing coins, stamps, and passports with varying degrees of self-seriousness. This bronze essai invokes Abner Doubleday, the American Civil War general apocryphally credited with inventing baseball — a claim thoroughly debunked by historians but stubbornly persistent in popular mythology. Why Doubleday appears on a Hutt River essai remains genuinely unclear, which is itself characteristic of the province's eclectic numismatic output.