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6 Pence Cairns; Officers' Club
| Issuer | U.S. Navy Petty Officers' Club, Cairns |
|---|---|
| Year | 1939-1945 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Plain cream paper voucher with black letterpress text arranged in three lines of decreasing size, followed by the large denomination numeral '6d.' at centre-bottom. The voucher has a distinctive serrated zigzag border on the left and right edges, typical of machine-cut canteen scrip. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | U.S. NAVY PETTY Officers' Club Cairns, Australia 6d. |
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| Comments |
U.S. Navy Petty Officers' Club scrip from Cairns, Queensland, falls into a category of wartime token currency that was almost never meant to survive. These fractional notes were issued for internal mess and canteen use — controlling spending, preventing cash from leaving the facility, and keeping accounting manageable in a high-turnover military environment. Cairns functioned as a significant Allied staging and supply base during the Pacific campaign, with substantial U.S. naval presence from 1942 onward.
Paper scrip of this type was routinely pulped at the end of a posting or when a unit rotated out. What survives does so almost entirely by accident — pocketed, tucked into letters home, or simply forgotten.