G'day Philip,

It is definitely "two bob's worth". No Australian would have had "two bobs" in the pocket - it would have been "two bob" ... back when two bob (twenty cents) was worth talking about. The sum could easily have been as a single two shilling coin, a florin (a term recognised, but rarely used by Australians).

Incidentally, the earliest English florins were marked "one tenth of a pound": England's first coin in a planned swith to logical decimal currency that was abandoned when the Poms went to war (again) with the French. The florin was now derided as "the traitor's coin" because the French had decimal currency and so the English should not.

Bob, for shilling, is a slang term that goes back to the convict era in Australia (1788 - ~1850s) and probably far back into its English roots. It was often used for a generic small sum, as in "(silly as a) two-bob watch".

regards,

Bob Bolton