How David Gee pulled off one of the most ambitious coin heists in Australian history

Coins, for most people — or at least those old enough to recognise actual physical currency without the assistance of a parent — are a deeply mundane affair.

They're a signifier of value, nothing more. You swap them for stuff you want: a cup of coffee, a chocolate bar, a phone call. Occasionally a coin might also help you unlock a jammed dunny door, or open a beer, or quantify your luck on the scratchies.

For a small but extremely focused slice of the human population, though, coins — rare ones, ancient ones — sing with a siren song inaudible to the rest of us. The itch to acquire such coins, to hoard them, to possess them at all costs, can in rare cases become so unscratchable that even the criminal codes offer scant deterrence.

Such is the case of David Gee, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s pulled off one of the most baroque and ambitious coin heists in Australian history, in which he nicked incredibly precious coins from the special collections of Australia's oldest library without anybody noticing.

The tale is featured in a new episode of ABC Listen's podcast, History Or Hoarding?.

What makes this story of subterfuge so extraordinary is that, in the Sydney of the late 1960s, which is where this tale is largely set, Gee himself was a highly noticeable person.

Flamboyant, sociable and generous, Gee ran a Kings Cross restaurant, enjoyed ballroom dancing, had a difficult-to-pin-down interest in the adult entertainment sector, and was utterly obsessed with coins. He'd developed the coin itch very young; having emigrated from China in 1939 with his parents at the age of 10, he was by his teenage years managing the books for the family's fruit and vegetable grocery business and diverting money wherever he could toward the acquisition of rare and collectable currency.

"Whenever he did things or talked to you, it was almost, ah, mesmerising," says Jim Noble, a celebrated Sydney numismatist and dealer who knew Gee.

"You couldn't get a word in. He was that excited about his coins, and he had a lot of good coins."

The pseudonyms

Noble himself became a coin freak as a boy. He still recalls at age 13 going to the cinema with his mother, still high on the excitement of buying his first rare coin — a "Gun Money" shilling minted by James II during the Williamite War in Ireland.

"I remember I sat on the end of the row seat where there was a little light and I kept getting my coin out and looking at it," he says.

Gee was every bit as passionate as Noble, but much more ethically ambiguous. And his urge to acquire rare coins took him, in the late 1960s, to the State Library of NSW — more particularly, the library's Dixson Collection. Named for benefactor William Dixson, a fervent collector and heir to a tobacco empire, the collection contains around 8,000 coins, notes and medals and a vast trove of Australiana.

Gee used the pseudonym "Robert Lowe" to register with the library's Special Collections division. It was one of more than 70 names he would adopt over the course of his life, the most swashbuckling of which was "Goldfinger". (In the online numismatic chat rooms where Gee is legendary, one participant recalls meeting him at a coin auction and asking him to autograph a copy of the 1986 hardcover, Heads I Win: The True Story of David Gee, Australia's Most Audacious Coin Forger. “Which name do you want me to sign?” the ever-suave Gee is reported to have asked.)

In an oral history recorded by the State Library of NSW in 2005, and which has since slumbered in the library's vast collection, librarian Joy Storie described "Mr Lowe" as an unforgettable and "very cheery" visitor who'd appear each morning.

"A loud booming voice would stride in … he would slap people on the back, whether that's staff or readers. And most of us responded with a big smile back, but [Dixson librarian] Bess Cook used to cringe, because she liked absolute quiet in the library."

"Mr Lowe" was always squeaky clean, Storie said. "He smelled a bit like Lifebuoy soap. And he always looked as if he'd just finished pressing his shirt. Always a blue shirt. Tucked in."

The cover story

The cover story proffered by "Mr Lowe" was that he was writing a book about Australian coins. In any other institution, such a pretext might have raised eyebrows. But in the library, where oddballs pursuing niche research topics are common, it was drab plumage indeed.

His presence was irritating to the librarians, though.

Like any taxpayer, "Mr Lowe" was entitled to request assistance to view anything in the library's collection. He wanted to see the coins. And because of their value, library rules dictated that he never be left alone with them.

It fell to Storie to spend what seemed like endless days monitoring "Mr Lowe" in a small room as he photographed and examined tray after tray of precious colonial-era Australian coins.

At Christmas, he windmilled in with bottles of French champagne for the staff. Dixson librarian Bess Cook was scandalised, insisting that they could not accept gifts or blandishments. A librarian was sent to pursue "Mr Lowe" and return the fizz. But he escaped.

What we now know is that David Gee — having studied and photographed the coins in the Dixson collection that he most deeply craved — then embarked on the next phase of his scheme.

Working under another assumed name with craftspeople across the engraving sector, he designed and commissioned replicas of the coins.

And when he next returned to the library, according to Joy Storie's account, it was with a genuinely preposterous new gambit.

"Well, time passed and I don't know what month it was… but it was after November anyway, because he came in and said that on Guy Fawkes' Night, his son — one of his sons — had inadvertently set fire [to] the study with a firecracker, and his photographic collection had gone up in flames and he would now have to rephotograph all the coins."

The switcheroo

After some debate and consternation, it was decided that this irritating numismatist could not be denied.

But this time, he brought different equipment: an improved camera set-up, which he said lit the coins better as he photographed them. The camera now had a plywood box cover, and he needed to place the coins inside the box to photograph them, obscuring the items briefly from the direct view of the supervising librarian.

With hindsight, of course, it is readily apparent that "Mr Lowe" was pulling a switcheroo worthy of only the lowest-grade trainee magician.

A deeply suspicious Joy Storie flagged the development with superiors at the time, but he was approved to continue.

And it wasn't until several years later — on March 16, 1973, when the library brought out a tempting selection of numismatic treats for a one-day-only exhibition for a fleet of coin experts visiting Sydney — that the first unmistakable whiff of disaster was detected.

Melbourne numismatist Ray Jewell (yes, nominative determinism seems to play as rich a role among collectors of rarities as it does among librarians, see among others: Joy Storie) in what is now a famous moment, leaned in for a second look at a tray of early colonial gold coins and, according to Jim Noble, wondered aloud: "Oh, that's very nice. But, um, when are we gonna see the real ones?"

A good forger — and by this stage of his career David Gee was very good — can craft a replica that is undetectable to all but the most practised eyes.

The library brought in experts to check through the Dixson collection. This process was inexact because the collection, being so vast, had not been catalogued fully. It took years to establish how many Gee fakes it contained. Certainly more than 30. Probably more.

And Gee's exploits were not limited to the library; his deep contacts in the coin community and even at the Mint meant that by the 1970s, Gee fakes were sloshing about everywhere.

A bullshit artist and an artist-artist

After a mesmerising criminal trial, Gee was jailed in 1979, and the collecting institutions across Australia felt a shiver of apprehension.

The library's catalogue is now unimpeachably thorough, and the coins live in the Strong Room, a secure fortress deep underground at the Macquarie Street site (some of the coins were used in evidence at Gee's trial). You can view a small collection of Gee forgeries at the National Mint.

Half a century after the theft, the story of Gee and his trickery remains a nightmare-inducing one that everybody at the library knows. They're only just ready to joke about it.

"We have a new access rule. No one who looks at the coins is allowed to have any clothing on," deadpans Maggie Patton, a veteran librarian, as she handles sheet after sheet of Dixson coins in the Strong Room.

And here's the thing: Gee forgeries are much prized in the coin-collecting world. Not because they're the real thing, but because they carry such a comet-trail of story behind them. David Gee was certainly a bullshit artist, but he was also an artist artist.

And Australian currency itself is in no position to disparage Gee. Its own story was born of criminality.

In the early days of the NSW colony, there was no local currency. Settlers got by with any British, Portuguese or Spanish currency they could scrounge, plus rum and promissory notes. It was an extremely ramshackle system.

Governor Macquarie resolved to strike a currency for the colony; he imported 40,000 silver Spanish dollars and puzzled over how to make them unique to NSW.

Fortunately for Macquarie, there was an expert already resident in Sydney, William Henshall, who oversaw the process of punching doughnut holes out of each coin, thus doubling the number that could go into circulation, and stamping them clearly with their new values: Five shillings for the doughnuts, 15 pence for the "dump", the smaller coin.

And how is it that William Henshall, an imaginative and deft designer and maker of coins, just happened to be in Sydney at the exact moment that Governor Macquarie found himself in need of this skill set?

Mr Henshall was in Sydney because he'd been deported from England in 1806, having been convicted of… forgery.

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