Fijian decimal in June WCN.

cladking

This is a thinly collected series and despite years of working on it the author of the
World Coin News article is far more knowledgeable than I. This series has always
fascinated me since one just doesn't see evidence that it's collected or that the coins
are available. All of mine are pre-1980 and the toughies have been those which don't
appear in mint sets.

World coinage is littered with countries or series which are unavailable and cheap. It's
a unique era to be a collector.

lordmarcovan

I always thought it funny that Fijian type (predecimal) was one of the albums put out by Dansco. I mean, they don't have any albums for widely-collected coins like British pennies or halfpennies, but they have albums for Fiji. Not that there's anything wrong with collecting Fijian coins, though if I were to do it, I would probably be more interested in the predecimal stuff, personally. I have a few of those. Some are fairly scarce.

cladking

I like the old shillings particularly because the design is so good. The silver coins were
widely saved both by collectors and by others as a store of value. When they became
cu/ ni in 1957 there were still quite a few saved though likely not as many. These later
ones are extremely common in circulated condition. It was not until the decimal coins were
issued that apparently almost everyone started ignoring the new coinage. The 20 C and
50 C designs are superb and the others are good for their simplicity. There were only a
few thousand mint sts of each date made and several dates weren't issued at all. There
are a few 1975 50 C in unc available even though they were not issued in sets. There is
a silver collectors version of the 1976 issue with a mintage of only 3,000 and a price of
only $13.50 in Krause. Interestingly this proof is probably far more common than the uncs
of this era.

One of the reasons that I generally prefer the higher denomination issues of moderns is
that when people start collecting these coins they'll probably tend to favor the highest de-
nominations which actually circulated. Of course the costs of setting these aside also re-
duces the number available.

I'd be interested to know what the circulating coin in Fiji looks like now days. I imagine it's
almost universally worn with the older issues in VG/F and the later issues in XF. The attrition
on these is probably low and many of the coins are discolored.