As long as you wished for new paintings in the National Gallery of Victoria when throwing a coin into their fountains, then your wish has come true!
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Cleaners are this week mopping their way through all the rubbish, mud and leaves that accumulate in the bed of the moats outside the St Kilda Road institution to collect coins for banking.
Sadly for the cleaners, hundreds of kilograms of coins thrown in by visitors and tourists over the years have mixed into several layers of mud and leaves. Everything has settled onto the moat floor in a heavy sludge.
Gallery staff started the biennial job on Monday morning by draining all the water from the 625 square metre pond into a recycling facility under the car park, where the water will be cleaned and then returned.
Staff donned waterproof boots and waders to start sifting and picking coins out of the mud, and it was slow work.
"It generally takes us one week to clean the moats," head of assets, facilities and information services at the NGV, Lucy Hastewell, said.
"The coins are cleaned, sorted and counted off-site. All collected coins are recorded as donations to the NGV for the acquisition of artwork."
The NGV cleaners scoop as many coins as they can carry into a bucket, then transfer those coins into a wheelie bin. Because the coins are so heavy they can only partially fill each bin. By Tuesday afternoon they were up to their seventh wheelie bin. It was too early to estimate the value of money collected from the fountains.
But after two years in open-air water the coins have turned various shades of red and green.
According to chief executive of the Royal Australian Mint, Ross MacDiarmid, the NGV's bank can get all the Australian coins replaced under the Mint's worn and damaged coins policy.
"All of the Royal Australian Mint's coins are 100 per cent recyclable," Mr MacDiarmid said. "Therefore when worn or damaged coins are identified, banks remove these from circulation and they are returned to the Mint to be recycled."
And if you have dropped anything precious into the moat in the past two years, it has been handed over to the lost property office.
Once the cleaners finish this fountain, work will start on the other 3200 square meters of moat that extends from the left of the entrance of the NGV, wraps around the building along Southbank Boulevard, and continues along the western wall in the garden. The gallery was also installing an external lighting project while the moats were empty, Ms Hastewell said.
