World gold · 7 min read

The Australian Kangaroo: a complete history

Australia is built on gold, so it is fitting that its national bullion coin began life celebrating the gold nugget itself. The Perth Mint's coin, launched in 1986, soon swapped nuggets for the kangaroo and became one of the world's most recognisable and longest-running gold bullion series, distinguished by its four-nines purity and a reverse design that changes every year.

From the Gold Nugget

The coin began in 1986 as the Australian Gold Nugget, issued by Gold Corporation, trading as the Perth Mint and owned by the government of Western Australia. It was Australia's first legal-tender gold bullion coin, struck in .9999 fine gold. The early coins were unusual: their reverses depicted famous Australian gold nuggets, including the colossal Welcome Stranger found in Victoria in 1869, and they were sold in individual hard plastic capsules with a distinctive two-tone frosted finish, presentation touches rare for bullion at the time.

Enter the kangaroo

Around 1989 to 1990 the Perth Mint made a decisive change, replacing the gold nugget on the reverse with a kangaroo, Australia's most recognisable symbol, and the coin became widely known as the Gold Kangaroo. The original kangaroo design came from the noted designer Stuart Devlin. The switch was a marketing triumph: the kangaroo was instantly identifiable worldwide and public interest jumped. The coin has carried a kangaroo ever since, though the exact design changes from year to year.

Purity, sizes and the annual design

The Kangaroo is struck in .9999 fine gold, the same four-nines standard as the Canadian Maple Leaf. It comes in a wide range of sizes, the popular tenth-ounce, quarter-ounce, half-ounce and one-ounce, plus larger 2 oz, 10 oz and one-kilogram coins introduced in 1991. Like the Chinese Panda, its reverse design changes annually, which adds a collectable, semi-numismatic dimension on top of the gold value. The obverse carried Queen Elizabeth II from the start until her death in 2022, with King Charles III appearing from 2024, the Kangaroo being among the first bullion coins to show the new monarch.

Record-breaking ambition

The Perth Mint has used the Kangaroo to show off its capabilities in spectacular fashion. In 2011 it struck the largest and most valuable gold coin in the world at the time, a one-tonne Kangaroo around 80 cm across and 12 cm thick, with a face value of a million Australian dollars but a gold value many times that. It is a reminder that behind the everyday bullion coin sits one of the world's most technically accomplished mints.

Collecting and storing Kangaroos

The annually changing reverse makes the Kangaroo a collector's series as much as an investor's, with the early Nugget-design coins of 1986 to 1989 holding particular interest. For storage, the high .9999 purity makes the coins soft and worth protecting carefully in a capsule, especially the proof and special issues. The one-ounce coin shares the roughly 32 mm diameter common to one-ounce gold coins, so it sits in the same size of capsule as a one-ounce Britannia, Krugerrand or Eagle, while the fractional sizes step down accordingly.