A Mint Place

With a spare few hours one morning, the girls and I decided to visit the Royal Australian Mint. We were pleasantly surprised with what a fantastic story this place tells.

Our tour began with a talk on the history of money in Australia. Really informative and the tour guide even managed to keep the girls attention for most of it. Beginning in 1788 describing the  difficulties faced by the first settlers; to punching the centre out of the Spanish dollar to create the 'holey dollar'; followed by British parliament passing laws to use only British currency in Australia; then discussing the influence of the gold rush on coins; creation of Australia's own currency; the introduction of decimal currency and concluding with recent changes and additions.

Amazing to think that in 2013 the mint produced about 128 million coins!! Next our birds eye view of the factory floor allowed us to see coins being made. Our tour guide explained the different process taking place in each area. The main attraction for the girls was watching the three robots.

Titan - the big orange robot whose job it is to lift drums of either blanks or finished coins (up to 750k). We watched him lift a drum containing $15,000 worth of 10¢ coins and he concluded this task with a few dance moves!

Robbie - smaller white robot who is positioned at the end of the conveyor belt  system and is programmed to place 200 packets of finished coins into a box in a specially designed pattern. Each bag weighs about 7kg. The mint can package up to 2 million coins per day!




Penny - automated guided vehicle who transports drums of coins around the floors including taking them to the vault. Penny is guided by laser beans.






We were shown the other mint products - tokens, medallion, medals (including those made for the Sydney Olympics),  and jewellery. Like most production lines, all is good when things are ok but when things go wrong mistakes are made. There were many display cabinets displaying imperfect coins and explaining what went wrong. Our tour was capped off by watching the small movie in the theatre.


To commemorate the day, the girls minted their own $1 coin in the gift shop.