The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
The Heads We Know, the Tales We Didn’t
Launching ‘Heads and Tales’ by Granville Allen Mawer
ROYAL AUSTRALIAN MINT
CANBERRA
WEDNESDAY, 6 AUGUST 2025
I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, on whose lands we meet today, and pay respects to all First Nations people present. My thanks to the Mint’s Acting CEO Emily Martin for hosting us today.
When I first began reading Heads and Tales, I was expecting a survey of coinage. Informative, perhaps even a little weighty. What I found instead was a book that is witty, elegant and delightfully idiosyncratic. A book that wears its learning lightly but never slouches. A book about coins, yes – but also about characters, chaos and the curious things we choose to commemorate in metal. A book with proof-quality scholarship and circulation-level charm.
Granville Allen Mawer has taken a subject that might have seemed numismatic in the narrowest sense, and given us something broader, richer and more alive. He reminds us that coins are not just currency. They are miniature monuments. They tell stories of empires and impostors, of saints and scoundrels, of innovation, inflation and, occasionally, elephants.
Take Themistocles, the Athenian general who helped see off the Persians at Salamis. After being exiled by the Athenians, who had a habit of discarding their heroes once they'd outlived their usefulness, Themistocles ended up governing a Persian satrapy. There, he did something extraordinary: he put his own head on the local coinage. According to Mawer, that is the earliest known example of a human being portrayed on a coin. It’s a fitting tribute for a man who had been both lionised and exiled – a face with a story on both sides.
This is one of the many joys of Heads and Tales. It doesn’t just list coins. It animates them. Each coin becomes a vignette: a parable of power, persuasion or sheer peculiarity. We meet a she-wolf suckling twins, a bronze dagger pretending to be money, an elephant in battle formation, and an emperor whose portrait on a coin tried to claim divine status, while everyone around him quietly rolled their eyes.
There are phrases here that made me laugh out loud, and others that stopped me mid-page. Mawer describes coins as ‘fossils’, not in the sense of being obsolete, but as imprints of the societies that made them. He points out that ‘not everything gets to leave a mark’, but coins often do – literally and metaphorically. They reflect what societies valued, who held power, and what those in charge wanted you to believe.
The book opens, appropriately, with barter – and with Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack, you’ll recall, was sent to trade the family cow and came back with magic beans. Mawer interprets this not as a cautionary tale about gullibility, but as an early story about money: a medium of exchange that stores value and unlocks future wealth. It’s a perfect example of the book’s method. Taking something familiar and revealing its unexpected economic wisdom.
We also meet Croesus, whose name became a byword for wealth. Croesus issued gold and silver coins to replace his father’s debased electrum, and in doing so gave the world bimetallism – and himself a lot of credibility. Less wisely, he later consulted the oracle at Delphi, which told him that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. It turned out to be his own.
In Mawer’s hands, coins become the straight men in a long-running comedy about human ambition. They’re minted in honour of victories that never quite materialised. They’re devalued, demonetised and occasionally demonised. They appear in plays by Aristophanes and policies by Augustus. And through it all, they remain small, circular carriers of big ideas.
Part of what makes this book so compelling is Mawer’s voice. It is dry, precise and wonderfully wry. His background in the public service – where understatement is both a virtue and a defence mechanism – gives him the ideal tone for a project like this. He knows when to be exact, when to be elliptical, and when to let the facts speak for themselves, especially when they’re absurd.
He also knows his craft. Allen Mawer is a historian of wide range and deep curiosity. He has written on the invention of the name ‘Antarctica’, Torres Strait maritime history, and cricket in the Limestone Plains. He is the author of Canberry Tales, which won the ACT Writing and Publishing Award for Non-Fiction, and of Ahab’s Trade, shortlisted for two state history prizes. His work has appeared in journals, books, museums and maps. He is, quite simply, one of Canberra’s most accomplished historical storytellers.
In Heads and Tales, all those threads come together. The book traverses continents and centuries, from the cowries of the Shang Dynasty to the engraved silver of Syracuse, from the lion-headed coins of Lydia to the ban liang coins of Qin. And it does so without ever losing sight of the people behind the metal: the minters, the merchants, the monarchs and the occasionally misguided megalomaniacs.
It is, in the end, a book about how we tell stories – through images, inscriptions and symbols. It’s about what we choose to put on the money, and what that says about us. And it’s a reminder that coins, though small in size, offer a surprisingly capacious window onto the cultures that created them.
Please join me in congratulating Granville Allen Mawer on this elegant and insightful contribution to our historical library, and in celebrating Heads and Tales – a book that transforms currency into history, and history into something richly human.
ENDS