On 14 February 2026, Australia quietly celebrated sixty years since we swapped pounds, shillings and pence for shiny new dollars and cents. And yes — I remember it clearly.
Because in 1966… we had a television.
That in itself felt quite modern. There we were, four children (with baby Sam due in April), gathered around the family TV cabinet with the curly indoor antenna, as the famous jingle burst into our lounge room:
In come the dollars and in come the cents,
To replace the pounds and the shillings and the pence,
Be prepared folks, when the coins begin to mix,
On the four-or-teenth of February 1966!
It was catchy. It was historic. It was slightly terrifying if you were under ten and had just mastered counting in shillings.
C-Day
On that day — dubbed C- Day — Australia officially moved to a base-ten currency system under Prime Minister Harold Holt. The old British-style system (12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound — perfectly logical, obviously!) was replaced with 100 cents in a dollar. Simple. Sensible. Revolutionary.
Well… mostly simple.
Heads or Tails
Dad somehow managed to get his hands on four brand-new shiny one-cent coins fresh off the mint to give us kids. I still remember how tiny and brown they looked — like small copper freckles. So different from a penny. They were huge in comparison. On one side, the head side, was Queen Elizabeth II, her portrait preserved forever in a coin. On the other side was the delicate little feather-tailed glider—one of Australia’s smallest gliding mammals and arguably the only creature light enough to carry a one-cent coin without strain.
‘Whoops. I swallowed mine’
My brother John was six at the time. He was lying on the lounge room floor with his knees up in the air, like he did most of the time when he wasn’t doing anything else.
For reasons known only to a six-year-old, he decided to put his one-cent coin in his mouth. Within seconds, it was gone. He’d swallowed it.
His face turned an alarming shade of tomato red. And I mean alarming. It always happened to John when he thought he was in trouble. His snowy white hair always made his red face look redder.
‘I swallowed my one cent,’ he announced, quietly and calmly as though that would help him be in less trouble.
Dad was not impressed. Not even slightly.
A reluctant treasure hunt
For the next couple of days, Mum and Dad embarked on what I can only describe as a reluctant treasure hunt. I’m fairly sure there were inspections involved. However, the operation was eventually abandoned. The one-cent coin, as it turned out, was almost exactly the same colour as the surrounding… landscape.
And so, somewhere in our family history, there is a missing one-cent piece that technically completed a full circulation.
Those one-cent pieces felt like treasure. We examined them as though they might hatch. We sniffed them (why did we all do that?). We stacked them. We lost them in couch cushions.
People adjusted – well, some did
What fascinates me now is how naturally Mum adjusted. She was decimal literate from the start. Unlike old adults, like our grandparents – and Dad – worried about ‘coin mixing’ — and for a while there was confusion. Prices had to be converted. Shopkeepers double-checked calculations. And for kids, it wasn’t easy either. They tried to work out whether two cents was better than a penny (it was, but only by 0.01667 decimal dollars).
Here is the breakdown based on the 1966 currency conversion:
- Two Australian Cents: Equals $0.02 (2 cents).
- One Australian Penny: After decimalisation, a penny was valued at 5/6 of a cent, which is equal to $0.008333 (or 0.8333 cents).
- Difference: $0.02 – $0.008333 = $0.011667 (approx).
When phrased in terms of cents, two cents were worth roughly 1.17 cents more than one penny.
Note: While the two-cent coin was often thought to be a replacement for the penny, it was actually designed to be the equivalent of 2.4 pence.
Thanks Google AI Overview – you’re amazing. And quick.
The birth of a Decimal Child
And somewhere in all that excitement, baby Sam arrived two months later — a true child of the decimal era.
Of course, the humble one-cent coin itself eventually retired in 1992. These days, spotting one feels like finding a fossil from the Copper Age.
But every 14 February, while others are celebrating Valentine’s Day, I find myself humming that jingle and remembering four tiny brown coins placed into four eager hands.
In came the dollars.
In came the cents.
And somehow, in came a whole new Australia — decimal, modern, and ready to count to one hundred without needing a slide rule.
Image from CoinsandAustralia.com – Thankyou
