Green’s Dictionary of Slang

money; the word implies the efforts involved in obtaining money.

1840		Bell’s Life in London in Fights for the Championship (1855) 165: Ned [...] stood a great deal of the ‘rowdy’ himself.
1841		W.L. Rede Sixteen String Jack I iv: He’s got the rowdy, hey?
1842		Whip & Satirist of NY & Brooklyn (NY) 14 May n.p.: After they had whacked each other [...] agreed to whack the rowdy.
1844		New Sprees of London 12: These swaddies generally are seen with very fine girls, well dressed, and mostly flush of roudy.
1852		Kendal Mercury 3 Apr. 6/2: He vont move a peg till they tips him the rowdy (money).
1854		‘Cuthbert Bede’ Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1982) II 179: I hope Stump and Rowdy have got something for me, because I want some tin very bad.
1857		Bell’s Life in Victoria (Melbourne) 17 Jan. 3/1: ‘[H]e bailed me up about two miles back, and took all my rowdy’.
1857		S.F. Call 26 Mar. n.p.: [He] Went to fight the furious tiger, / Went to fight the beast at faro, / And was cleaned out so completely / That he lost his every mopus, / Every single speck of pewter, / Every solitary shiner, / Every brad and every dollar [...] All the rowdy, all the stumpy.
1864		Bell’s Life in Victoria 12 Mar. 3/4: [T]he everlasting stories of ‘pulling,’ ‘not going for the rowdy,’ and other elegant slang terms.
1865		Leaves from Diary of Celebrated Burglar 158/1: The worst of it is I’ve no ‘rowdie’ to ‘max’ her with.
1866		Letters by an Odd Boy 160: Beans, blunt, brass, bustle, coppers, chinkers, chips, dibbs, mopusses, needful, ochre, pewter, quids, rays, rowdy, shiners, stuff, tin, and stumpy!
1873		Sl. Dict.
1885		Bulletin (Sydney) 26 Sept. 14/3: By the night coach an accountant from a gold-field branch arrived with some boxes and bags of ‘the rowdy’ in its raw state, and, ringing the bell, waited for the messenger.
1905		Exeter & Plymouth Gaz. 4 Feb. 5/6: Money in general is known as: The Actual, Coliander Seeds, [...] Hard, John Davis, King’s Pictures, [...] Nonsense, Oil of Angels, [...] Rowdy.
1919		Smith’s Wkly (Sydney) 7 June 9/6: Slang of Money [...] It has been called ‘the actual, the blunt, hard, dirt, evil, flimsy, gilt, iron, John Davis, lurries, moss, oil of angels, pieces, rowdy, spondulicks, tin, wad’ .