Not the ming, surely

You got threepence for a soft drink bottle you found along the road, and we walked miles, so we found a fair few. Threepence was threepence, after all. You could buy a pie for tenpence and they didn’t charge for the sauce.

On a few very rare occasions we would find a Wynvale glass flagon, and they were worth two shillings, two bob, and that was good money for us.

Many of my early memories were around the sudden joy of having a little money, if only for a day or two. When I went to the Olympic Games in Melbourne on a school excursion (imagine that happening now) I was given a white and tan and orange ten shilling note to spend and, even more glorious, when I went to the Melbourne Show in 1957 Dad gave me a green one-pound note, more money, I think, that I had ever owned before. It broke my heart to break it.

Those great memories were all at once removed on February 14, 1966, when pounds, shillings and pence were replaced by dollars and cents.

Words like two bob, deener, zac, trey, florin, fiver, tenner and quid almost disappeared from our language overnight. The names we use for the new decimal notes lack imagination and show one more sign of the boring people we are becoming. I know I am, anyway. Pineapple. Lobster. Even “avocado”. Fifty seven years after their introduction we still don’t have good slang names for them.

The once-mighty dollar was going, at first, to be called the Royal, because of our Prime Minister’s love for things British. This was announced in 1963 and, quite predictably, there was an outcry from those people who do outcries. There was even a sardonic move to have the dollar named a Ming, after the Prime Minister, who had come to use the Mingis Scottish pronunciation of Menzies.

There were many other proposals for the name but the only other one to get much traction was the Austral. The government wanted a name for the dollar that was distinctively Australian but finally gave into the name almost everyone else and most other countries used, dollar. That decided, the Decimal Currency Act of 1963 went ahead.

It was not a new idea. As early as 1902 Federal Government committees were proposing a change to a decimal system. Before the Great War there were efforts to change all the Commonwealth countries to a decimal system in one fell swoop. New Zealand and South Africa supported the idea very strongly, but Britain was unmoved. It was felt that the Commonwealth was all in, or all out. The proposal lapsed.

In 1937 it was raised by a Royal Commission into the banks, but though the change was recommended there were other more important issues, which meant it went back on the back burner.

It was 1957 before it was raised again, when various business groups formed the Decimal

Currency Council. The Federal Government responded by forming the Decimal Currency Committee, then the Decimal Currency Board, which was to oversee the actual change.

In 1963 the government announced that the change was on. Over a period of two years there would be an education program across the country, and there would be a two-year period in which both currencies could be used.

People in favour of the change – and it did make a certain amount of sense – argued that time would be saved in businesses where counting money and calculating values and costs was a heavy load. It was even suggested that huge amounts of time would be saved in schools because the teaching of arithmetic would be simpler.

Money went out to the banks in the secret “Operation Fastbucks”. There were 600 million new decimal coins alone – those coins were worth about 24 million dollars and they were delivered all over the country, in secrecy and on time. The notes were ready, too, but they were not seen as such an urgent priority because the old notes matched them in value. A dollar note was worth ten shillings, and so on. Even the colours were reasonable consistent.

Most of the coins matched up, too, but for the pennies and halfpennies, which were gone. A penny was a twelfth of a shilling and a shilling was now 10 cents, so a cent was nominally worth 1.2 pence and a two-cent coin was worth 2.4 pence. The old coppers were gone, except for the pennies in two-up games. Nobody would dream of changing that particular tradition.

Sculptor Stuart Devlin designed the new coins, and his designs have remained for a long time. There have been changes to the designs for special occasions but the glider on the one-cent coin and the frill-neck lizard on the two-cent coin have passed into history. The five-cent coin still has its echidna shown belly-first, the ten-cent coin has its lyrebird, the twenty-cent coin still has the platypus and the fifty-cent coin seems to have something different every year or so. Kangaroos still adorn the one-dollar coin and a Warlpiri-Anmatyerre elder is on the two-dollar coin. The 50-cent coin and the two-dollar coins have had many variations on the reverse side but they have always returned more or less to the original designs.

We steadily decimalised everything else, too. A “Collingwood six-footer” was now a “Collingwood one point eight meterer”, which does not really roll off the tongue. A farmer with, say, 200 acres suddenly only had just under 81 hectares, cutting the farm to half-size! Most farmers did not rush out with a metric tape measure to check because the conversion runs to nine decimal places and they had more important things to do.

Farmers said that acres were simpler to manage, but an acre was often defined as being equal to an area one chain wide and one furlong long. Furlongs are another word that has almost vanished. The Melbourne Cup was once run over two miles, or sixteen furlongs, but it is now over 3200 metres, much, much further.

It was all brought home to me, and hence this column, when I asked a bloke in a timber yard for some “four by” and some “three by two” and just got a blank stare.

Leaving aside my attempts at humour, there were people who really struggled with the change. There was a grand old lady – and she really was a lady – who worked behind the bar at the Pier Hotel in Frankston, and kept a stern but benevolent eye on the teachers’ college boys. She gave it away because after all the years of rapid-fire change-making she just could not get her head around the new system. She was not the only one.