Catalog
5 Pounds
| Issuer | Bank of Adelaide |
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| Year | ND (1910) |
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| Currency | Australian pound (1910-1966) |
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| Obverse description | The obverse is printed in brown and black on white paper, with the heading 'The Bank of Adelaide' in ornate script across the top. A central vignette presents a classical allegorical group of figures, flanked by guilloche rosettes at each corner bearing the numeral '5'; the lower-left corner carries a large letterpress 'FIVE' within a decorative panel. An overprinted diagonal text reads 'AUSTRALIAN NOTE', reflecting the note's status under Commonwealth Treasury authority, and manuscript-style text in the centre panel states the promise to pay 'FIVE POUNDS' with date and place lines for Adelaide, with a signature line for the Manager at lower right. |
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| Reverse description | The reverse is entirely plain, printed on unadorned white cotton paper with no design, vignette, or lettering, consistent with the practice of many Australian private bank issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. |
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The Bank of Adelaide was one of South Australia's longer-lived private trading banks, surviving the catastrophic bank crashes of 1893 that wiped out several of its competitors. By 1910 the private banknote-issuing era in Australia was already closing — the Commonwealth Bank was established that same year, and the path toward a federalised currency was becoming politically unavoidable.
Private Australian trading bank notes from this period are genuinely uncommon in any condition. Most were redeemed and pulped as federal currency gradually displaced state-issued and bank-issued paper over the following decade. The Bank of Adelaide itself continued operating — eventually absorbed into ANZ in 1980 — but surviving examples of its pre-federal issues surface rarely at auction.