A rainforest in north-eastern Australia still shelters plants whose ancestors grew on Gondwana, and this coloured 2011 one-dollar coin from the Perth Mint’s Celebrate Australia series is dedicated to it: the Wet Tropics of Queensland.

The Wet Tropics were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988. The forest stretches for about 450 km along the coast and covers less than 0.2% of the country, yet it is home to 30% of the continent’s marsupial species and 60% of its bat species. UNESCO calls it one of the most complete living records of the evolution of land plants, with relict lineages surviving here for 50–100 million years.

The Mint launched Celebrate Australia in 2009 with eight dollars devoted to the states and territories, and from 2010 turned to World Heritage sites. Five coins followed in 2011: the Wet Tropics, the Gondwana Rainforests, Macquarie Island, Purnululu and the Australian Fossil Mammal Sites. They are coloured aluminium-bronze coins issued on illustrated cards; the reverse carries the site’s name and the P mintmark, the obverse Ian Rank-Broadley’s portrait of Elizabeth II.

No mintage limit was set in advance, yet the Mint’s official figures give only 2,977 pieces for the Wet Tropics, several times fewer than any dollar of the 2010 series. For a collection of Australian nature or UNESCO themes it is a notable and scarce position.

UNC condition: the coin has never been in circulation, there is no wear and the mint lustre is intact.

If you collect coins by country or by theme, take a look at the VPcoins catalogue: it is a convenient place to find the neighbouring pieces of a series.