DAVID GEE, AUSTRALIA'S AUDACIOUS COIN FORGER

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V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 19, 2026, Article 18

Don Cleveland passed along this article headlined, "How David Gee stole the Australian National Coin Collection." A fascinating story I wasn't aware of, and in a bonus for bibliophiles, there's a book about it. Here's an excerpt - see the complete article online. -Editor

1853 Port Phillip Kangaroo Office gold piece

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?.

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."

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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