Coins and notes have been around for centuries and serve a vital purpose in ensuring society has a means of payment and exchange.  Money takes us from a bartering society into a more modern method that allows us to buy and sell goods and services locally, nationally and internationally.  It would be really hard to send 200 cows to your husband’s family to pay your dowry these days, especially if they lived in a country that had really strict border security regulations.

So, I had a think back to what we used to do with those loose coins.

As church goers, we children would attend Sunday School (wearing hats and gloves), and with a penny knotted in the corner of our hankie to put in the collection plate.

Once we started school, we were signed up for school savings schemes and each received a passbook and each week we would show up with our penny to go into our savings account.

I have 2 sisters and a younger brother. One of our common childhood experiences back in the 1960’s, was an annual Christmas visit to our maternal grandmother in a regional country town.  Sometimes there were over 40 of us for a sit-down meal.

Nanna would make traditional fruit Christmas pudding, hung for weeks in calico bags in a cool, dry space to age and mature, then boiled for at least 4 hours on Christmas morning, on a woodstove, regardless of the late December heat in Australia.    Inside the pudding would be threepences which the finder could keep.  In the end, I think Nanna was probably salting the kid’s puddings as we each seemed to get one.

Australia used imperial currency, based on the British pounds, shillings and pence, until changeover to decimal currency on the 14^th February 1966, when we started to use the metric system of the Australian dollar.  I was 9 at the time so I was taught the imperial currency and weights and measures in my early school years, then converted to metric for my senior years of school.

The threepenny coin name was pronounced “thrippence” but as small children, we could not say that, so Nanna’s puddings used to contain “frippances”.  To this day, when we have Christmas together and pudding is on the menu, we always ask if there are any frippances in it as we don’t want to break our teeth!

The threepence was replaced in 1966 with a 5 cent piece with an echidna on the front and a sovereign head on the rear, Charles III the most recent, but was not favored for puddings as far as I know.  The 5 cent piece is made of 75% copper and 25% Nickel.

I believe the threepence was used for puddings because the coin was the lowest denomination that had a high percentage of silver in it.  No-one could afford to boil a higher denomination silver coin, and pennies and halfpennies didn’t have any silver.  Prior to 1919, an Australian 3 penny piece contained 92.5% Ag (silver).  After 1919, the silver content was reduced to 50%, but I know that Nanna used to search out and find earlier coins.  She wasn’t quite as confident boiling Nickel for 4 hours.

These days, I don’t make homemade Christmas pudding though some family members still do.  No frippances though.  The supply dried up years ago.