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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John the Jute, post: 547901, member: 17740&quot;]Sorry it&#039;s taken me a while to come back to you guys with thanks and with an attempt to answer Yahya&#039;s question. You have answered my question of course: I should not bother to search for a 1927 Melbourne sovereign.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I agree. One of my focus areas is postwar Australians. In 1918, the three Australian mints reached their peak output, minting over 12 million sovereigns between them. Then Melbourne, in 1919, and Sydney, in 1920, dropped to mintages of just a few hundred thousand a year each, except for the abortive attempt to return to the gold standard in 1925. Perth continued to mint between one and two million but, as you say, lots of sovereigns disappeared.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Perhaps because they are not very old, there doesn&#039;t seem to be much collector focus on them. The major rarities, like 1920 Sydney, sell for an enormous amount, but quite uncommon sovereigns are available for modest sums.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Earlier 20th-century Australians trade for their bullion value unless they are in uncirculated grade. Perhaps that&#039;s as it should be--total mintages remained over 9 million throughout the reign of Edward VII--but I was a little surprised to receive an 1899 Perth in about VF grade as part of a bullion batch recently. 1899 is the key date of the Perth series, and in uncirculated grade would cost more than $A 1000.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I know of two sovereign extinction events in the second quarter of the 20th century--one in the US, one in the UK--and there may have been more. Was there one in Australia?</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>An awful lot of sovereigns were exported from the UK to the US during WWI to pay for war materiel. Presumably many of these found their way to the US Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky. My understanding is that the 1934 US Gold Reserve Act required coin to be melted and converted into bars. The vast bulk of 1916 and 1917 London-struck sovereigns disappeared into this melting pot.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The second extinction event was caused by the way the Gold Standard was reinstated in the UK. Before the War, you could take a £5 note into the Bank and receive 5 sovereigns in exchange. In 1925, under the new Gold Bullion Standard, you could exchange currency for gold only in 400 ounce bars, costing about £1700. This should have reduced the amount of gold demanded; but it meant that the Bank had to melt large numbers of sovereigns to make the bars.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Quite why Sydney coins were more likely to be melted than Melbourne coins remains a mystery to me.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Later,</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>John[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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