In 1965, when I was nine, I started earning “wages”. It was 2 shillings a week. My jobs were cleaning out the chook house, collecting the eggs, milking the cow in the afternoon shift and digging up spuds for tea. I also did some things for free like tormenting the ferret.  If I threw a hissy fit and didn’t work, I didn’t get any wages.  Simple formula.

Friday night was wages night.  My parents scratched around in their pockets and purses and asked each other the question that filled me with high levels of expectation:

“Got any loose change?”

Two shillings was counted out in the exact amount coin by coin with great ritual into my eagerly outstretched hand.  Every week, my two shilling count-out came in different assortments of pennies, threepences, sixpences and halfpennies. Little bits that added up. From my loot, I would count out a shilling which I would drop coin by coin into my money box – a green tin replica of the Commonwealth Bank.  Remember them?

The other shilling was mine to spend on my pleasure. I don’t know where this half-half save-spend formula came from and I never questioned it.  Pleasure was usually an Archie comic, a White Night, a Choo Choo Bar and a four-for-a-penny licorice block.  They were all good value. You could swap the comic with siblings or friends and the lollies lasted ages. Chewing the licorice block always made you dribble long bits of licorice slime right down your chin and if you were fast enough you could suck it up again for a bit of re-cycling.

Anyway, it was a momentous day when the money box was full. I’d take it to the bank, line up in the queue and when it was my turn I’d hand it up to the teller. With a flourish it was opened with what looked like a tin opener. It was symbolically broken into.

The loose change would tumble out and form a random pile of silver and copper.  It always amazed me just how many of those coins could fit into the money box.  How bounteous were the fruits of my daily labours! You just forgot that you filled it up one coin at a time and that took a concerted effort.

Each coin would be counted out by the teller, rolled in tight brown paper, stacked up and the final amount written in my bank book. The bank teller would give me a shiny new money box and the remnants of the old one. The sharp edges were great for doing autopsies on rats.

Year after year my assets grew. There came the time when I would cash some of it in for something I was saving up for and my parents would match it as a bonus for my diligence. Some of it I would keep as an investment in my future.

I quickly came to understand the value of loose change and what it was worth. To me change was always loose. My parents never said:

 “Got any tight change?”

This is what I figured out:

Life is unpredictable. On 14th February, 1966, 11 days before my 10th birthday the change changed. Decimal currency arrived. At first it was great because you got to learn new songs like this (sung to “Click go the Shears”)

In come the dollars, in come the cents,
to replace the pounds and shillings and the pence.
Be prepared for changes when the coins begin to mix,
on the 14th of February, 1966.

The new coins were fantastic, all shiny and modern with all Australian animals.  It was exciting and an added motivation to work hard to collect the whole set. That is, until you found out they didn’t exactly line up with the old coins.  The value of the currency had changed.

The conversion formula didn’t make sense. Now I got 40 cents and I was worse off.

In the transition time when both currencies were in circulation, you realised that one and two cents were the go as they were a one-to-one match with pennies, but then you started to lose out.  For example, sixpence worth of four-for-a penny licorice blocks gave you 24 blocks, but five cents worth only gave you 20.  You could buy two cents worth at a time but that was time consuming and came to a halt when the shopkeeper got sick of all these enterprising kids and put a five cent minimum on mixed lollies. Choo Choo bars, White Nights and comics cost either sixpence or 5 cents, so not everything was affected.  You learned to change your purchasing habits and make adjustments to the new currency.

However, there were advantages. With 1 and 2 cents being smaller, it meant that the money box filled up faster, so you went to the bank more frequently, you got more stamps in your bankbook and a larger collection of tin opened money boxes. If you just got copper and five cents, you felt like a millionaire. There was even more variation on how things could manifest.