About the AUD/GBP rate
The AUD/GBP rate is how many GBP one Australian dollar buys. It moves constantly with interest-rate expectations, commodity prices and global risk sentiment - see what moves the rate. Tradergy shows the mid-market reference rate and does not forecast where it’s heading. For the 52-week highs and lows and a daily table, see the AUD/GBP rate history.
Reading the same rate from the other side: the reverse rate, GBP → AUD, is on the receiving British pound view, and sending Australian dollars to the United Kingdom is covered on the AUD → GBP transfer page. Every AUD pair sits on the convert hub, and to work in more than one currency at once there is the currency converter.
Who issues a pound, and what legal tender means
Seven institutions issue sterling banknotes. The Bank of England is the only one that issues them in England and Wales; three banks are authorised to issue in Scotland, and three in Northern Ireland. What comes out of all seven is pounds sterling in exactly the same sense. The notes look different because the issuer is different, not because the money is.
The arrangement is supervised, not merely tolerated. The Bank of England explains that the six commercial issuers must by law set aside assets worth at least the value of every banknote they have in circulation, so that if one failed, the holders of its notes could be reimbursed. The Bank checks those assets, visits where they are stored, counts them, and can fine an issuer that falls short. Part of the backing may be held in Bank of England notes that never reach the public: one-million-pound notes known as Giants, and hundred-million-pound notes known as Titans.
Legal tender is where the confusion sits, and on the Bank's own account the term means far less than it sounds. It concerns the settlement of debts: if a debt is offered in a form that counts as legal tender, and no contract says otherwise, the creditor cannot sue for non-payment. It obliges no retailer to accept anything, and a shop may refuse a fifty-pound note if it wishes. The Bank states plainly that English banknotes are not legal tender in Scotland, and that Scottish notes are not legal tender in England or in Scotland. None of that makes any of them less valid as money.
What the arrangement changes in practice is small and real. Notes brought back from Edinburgh or Belfast are ordinary sterling and an Australian bank treats them as such, though a counter that rarely sees one may take longer over it. The awkwardness travels in the other direction too: a Scottish twenty is occasionally refused in a London shop by someone who believes it is foreign money, and the Bank's own explainer exists partly because that keeps happening.
Sources: Bank of England, Scottish and Northern Ireland banknotes · Bank of England, What is legal tender?