The Bright Ideas collection features the stump jump plough, designed in 1876 by South Australian farmer Richard Smith and adopted worldwide as a cornerstone of farming technology.
The collection also honours the jaffle maker, invented in 1949 by Dr Ernest Smithers and later re-imagined as an electronic toaster by Breville, and the black box flight recorder, invented in 1953 by Defence scientist Dr David Warren, which collects cockpit data used to investigate plane crashes.
Also featured are the Safe-n-Sound baby safety capsule, created in 1984 by Adelaide trio Bill Bowtell, Bob Heath and Colin Nagel to improve safety for infants travelling in cars, and high-speed Wireless LAN (WLAN) technology, developed with help from CSIRO scientists in the 1990s, which paved the groundwork for Wi-Fi.
Mint chief executive Emily Martin said the coins gave Australians "a chance to stop, look again and celebrate the people who thought differently". She said she had used four of the five inventions without necessarily stopping to think about the Australian ingenuity behind them.
"These aren't inventions sitting behind glass in a museum. They're ideas that have become part of Australian life," she said.