The ‘Shilling Ram’ was a prizewinning Riverina merino named Uardry 0.1. Photo: NLA.
When Australia decided to “modernise and improve” the design of its coins in 1938, designers of the shilling settled on a portrait of a Riverina ram to capture the spirit of the new nation.
New coins were needed after King George VI assumed the British throne and the Australian coat of arms that adorned some of the local currency had been updated.
The shilling (12 pence), the threepenny and the penny were all to be given a revamp as explained by The Northern Times in November, 1937.
“The Merino ram’s head, which will appear on the new shilling, is a fairly close representation of a celebrated Australian Merino ram,” they said.
In fact, the ‘Shilling Ram’ was a portrait of one of the most famous sheep in Australian pastoral history and was bred to ovine perfection on the vast Uardry Station on the Murrumbidgee River between Hay and Darlington Point.
Named ‘Uardry 0.1’, this prizewinning Riverina ram made headline news when he strutted his stuff at the 1932 Sydney Sheep Show.
“This was generally acknowledged to be one of the most magnificent merinos ever seen in Sydney,” gushed The Sydney Mail.
“He is known as Uardry 0.1, and, after winning in his class (under three years old), gained the championship of the strong-wool section, and, finally, the supreme merino award.
“He has all the characteristics of greatness in his splendidly-modelled body, his strong head and horns, and his beautiful, soft, richly-crimped fleece.”
As the saying goes, Australia had “ridden on the sheep’s back” for almost 150 years, and the value of the hardy merino sheep to the colony’s economic fortunes could not be understated.
First introduced by John Macarthur and Samuel Marsden in 1797, the merino thrived in Australia, and by 1938, there were well over 100 million of them across the continent.
Uardry Station on the Murrumbidgee River takes its name from the Wiradjuri word for the yellow box tree and was initially established as a cattle run in 1840.
Stretching across hundreds of thousands of acres at its peak, the property moved primarily into sheep in the 1860s and was influential in pioneering the new style of large-scale agricultural ventures,
Charles Mills purchased the station in 1875, invested in a small flock of Peppin Merinos, and carefully managed the bloodlines under studmaster Neilson Mills.
Over the decades, Uardry established an international reputation and the pinnacle of more than 50 years of breeding took form in the perfect head and horns of Uardry 0.1.
In the wake of the 1932 Sydney win, well-known Western Australian sheep-classer Tom Atkinson reportedly wrote to Mills to praise the “most magnificent ram I have ever seen” and suggested his name be changed to Hallmark.
The smiling Hallmark merino was rendered for the Australian shilling coin by English artist George Kruger Gray.
The Riverina’s most handsome sheep adorned the shilling from 1938 to 1963 and remains in circulation today after the image was revived to appear on the 1991 50-cent coin and a special one-dollar coin minted in 2011.
Original Article published by Chris Roe on Region Riverina.
