First Official Banknote of Australia to Be Auctioned

choi

(1) Australia's First Banknote Uncovered in Scotland Goes Under Hammer. AFP, Mar 12, 2014.
news.yahoo.com/australias-first-banknote-going-under-hammer-054552497.html

Note:
(a) The banknote reads:

"No. 55   Bank of New South Wales

On Demand Promise to pay J Lee
or Bearer Ten Shillings Sterling
Sydney (No. 55)  8 day of April 1817

TEN SHILLINGS    for the President
[signed]    and Co. of the BANK
[signed]      [signed] Cashier
[signed]"

(b) shilling
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilling

was used first in England (in the reign of "Edward VI ca 1550 * * * One shilling equals 12 pennies") then in UK ("there were 20 shillings per pound and 12 pence per shilling, and thus there were 240 pence in a pound") until "decimalisation [in 1971 when] the shilling coin was superseded by the new five-pence piece" and a pound sterling is now equal to 100 pence.
(i) difference between pence and pennies in UK (US currency uses pennies, not "pence"):

pence (n): "BRITISH   plural form of penny   Usage * * *"
Oxford dictionaries
www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pence
(ii) shilling (English coin)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilling_(English_coin)
(Henry VIII's young son Edward VI continued the issues of base testoons. In his reign the testoons were called "shillings" for the first time, and the coins show the bust of the young boy king)
(iii) Edward VI of England
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_VI_of_England
(1537-1553; reign 1547-1553; son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour and the third monarch of the Tudor dynasty and England's first monarch raised as a Protestant)

(c) "In 1812, to alleviate the shortage of currency, he [Macquarie] imported £10,000 in Spanish coins from India."
(i) The "Â" prior to the pound sign is apocryphal, owing to coding errors of quite a few softwares (and widely reported in the Web).  
(ii) The quotataion says that Macquarie got £10,000-worth of Spanish coins. The Spanish coins naturally was NOT denominated in pounds, which has been the currency of British Isles.

pound sterling
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling
("The pound sterling is the world's oldest currency still in use. The pound was a unit of account in Anglo-Saxon England, equal to 240 silver pennies and equivalent to one pound weight of silver")
(iii) The unit of Spanish coins was "dollar." That is how US currency got its name.

(d) Holey Dollar
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holey_dollar(a coin whose middle was punched out of Spanish dollar

holey (adj): "having hole"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/holey
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