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Early Colonial Currency Treasury Bills of Exchange |
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See the separate article on Paper Money in Early New South Wales. Bills of Exchange on the English Treasury were issued by the colonial authorities to pay for the goods and produce needed to keep the settlement going. These notes were usually pre-printed with space reserved for details such as the payee, amount, date and signature to be hand-written as required. The wording of these bills - pay to the order of - made them negotiable, and therefore capable of being used as a transferable medium of exchange. It was not appropriate to draw up a Bills on the Treasury for small day-to-day transactions. Instead, the Government Store - the Commissariat - used a system of transferable Store Receipts as an intermediate step. A number of these store receipts would then be consolidated, at intervals set down by the authorities, for a Bill on the English Treasury. A similar arrangement was used by the military. Paymasters' currency notes and bills were used to pay the soldiers and to obtain local supplies. These were later consolidated, usually quarterly, for Bills of Exchange on the Treasury. The bill shown above was issued from the Hobart Town commissariat in 1835 and is typical of most Treasury Bills issued in the early decades of the colony.
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