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"All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?!”
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<p>Do you have some loose change lying around the house or in the centre console of your car? Check it quickly!</p>
All 50c coins minted that year were supposed to display a First Fleet ship and the dates 1788-1988 to acknowledge the bicentenary. But an unknown number of those were wrongly minted.
On 26 January 1988, the celebration of the Bicentennial, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke gave a speech in which he famously declared: “In Australia, there is no hierarchy of descent, there is no privilege of origin.”