Australia

The British colony founded at Sydney Cove in 1788 had almost no coin. Accounts were kept in pounds, shillings and pence sterling, but what changed hands was a jumble of British silver, Spanish and Portuguese coin carried in by whalers, Indian rupees, settlers’ promissory notes, and receipts issued by the government Commissariat against its stores. Governor Macquarie’s remedy in 1813 was to buy forty thousand Spanish dollars and punch the centre out of each, creating the holey dollar rated at five shillings and the dump at one shilling and threepence, so that the coin could not profitably be carried away again; colonial money consequently stood at a discount to sterling for years. The paper record is far richer than the coinage. Every governor’s despatch to London, with its salary lists, estimates and building accounts, was copied and kept, and the whole run was published from 1914 as the Historical Records of Australia and is now fully digitised, so the colony’s architects, surveyors and draughtsmen can be priced almost to the day.

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Francis Greenway’s Salary as Acting Civil Architect of New South Wales 1816

Francis Howard Greenway, a Bristol architect convicted of forgery and landed at Sydney as a convict in 1814, was employed by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in March 1816 as Acting Civil Architect — the one case in the British Empire of a convicted forger being handed the design of a colony’s public buildings. Reporting the arrangement to Earl Bathurst in April 1817, Macquarie wrote that he had availed himself of Greenway’s “Skill and Scientific Knowledge as a Civil Architect,” for which he received three shillings a day from the Colonial Funds, together with quarters for his family, a horse and forage. London approved the allowance in 1818 while refusing to make the office permanent; in 1819 Macquarie asked to raise it to five shillings, citing Greenway’s “Scientific Skill, Judgment and superior Taste.” The figure is one year at the 1816 rate converted at sterling’s gold parity, and is an upper bound, because the Colonial Fund’s circulating medium stood at a discount to sterling and no gold coin circulated in the colony.

~400.9g

Governor Lachlan Macquarie to Earl Bathurst, 4 April 1817, in Historical Records of Australia, Series I, Volume IX, pp. 352–353; Earl Bathurst to Macquarie, 24 August 1818, ibid., p. 833; Macquarie to Bathurst, 24 March 1819, Historical Records of Australia, Series I, Volume X, p. 99; “Greenway, Francis Howard (1777–1837),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University.