$10 — Ten Dollars
The artwork
Front: Mary Gilmore — poet, journalist and campaigner — in a portrait from her middle years, high lace collar and all. Behind her sits the slab hut of the Cosme settlement in Paraguay, where she joined the New Australia colony. A pen nib, a sprig of bramble wattle and a sulphur-crested cockatoo fill the clear window, with "Jennie", her family name for herself, tucked beside her shoulder.
Back: A.B. "Banjo" Paterson faces the other way, drawn from a young studio photograph. Beside him a stockman rides hard down a mountainside — the scene from "The Man from Snowy River" — and lines of his verse run as microtext across the field. The bramble wattle and the cockatoo carry over from the front, and the large "10" sits with the top-edge tactile bumps.
In circulation
Issued 20 September 2017 as the third note of the Reserve Bank's Next Generation Banknote programme, replacing the 1993 polymer ten with the same two literary figures in an older design. That earlier note remains legal tender but is steadily being withdrawn as it returns to the Bank.
Details
- IssuerReserve Bank of Australia
- CurrencyDollar ($)
- DenominationTen Dollars
- Collectedon the Australia journeys, 2005–2024
- SeriesNext Generation Banknote series, first issued 2017; serial prefix AA17
- PrinterNote Printing Australia, Craigieburn, Victoria
- SignaturePhilip Lowe, Governor; John Fraser, Secretary to the Treasury
- SecurityClear top-to-bottom window with flying cockatoo and rolling-colour effect, patch with reversing "10", microtext of Paterson's verse, two tactile bumps at each edge
- Dimensions137 × 65 mm, polymer