5 Pounds

The Bank of Adelaide was one of South Australia's longer-lived private trading banks, surviving the catastrophic bank crashes of 1893 that wiped out several of its competitors. By 1910 the private banknote-issuing era in Australia was already closing — the Commonwealth Bank was established that same year, and the path toward a federalised currency was becoming politically unavoidable.

Private Australian trading bank notes from this period are genuinely uncommon in any condition. Most were redeemed and pulped as federal currency gradually displaced state-issued and bank-issued paper over the following decade. The Bank of Adelaide itself continued operating — eventually absorbed into ANZ in 1980 — but surviving examples of its pre-federal issues surface rarely at auction.