6 Pence - George VI

Australia's wartime sixpences present a quiet documentation problem: the Royal Australian Mint did not yet exist, so all silver coinage was struck at the Royal Mint's Melbourne and Sydney branches, both operating under pressures of wartime metal allocation. In 1942 and 1943, with Japanese forces threatening the Pacific, the Australian government quietly reviewed whether silver coinage should be debased or suspended entirely — a decision ultimately deferred until the postwar period, when the .925 standard was finally abandoned in 1946.

The 1945 issue closed out this standard for good. Collectors should note that the Melbourne and Sydney branch mint marks carry meaningfully different mintage figures across these years.