Decimal Girl marks the decades of change
Marie Summers thought she had got away with it this year.
Her 60th birthday had come and gone and, for the first time in 50 years, she hadn’t had a pesky reporter come knocking.
Every decade, the Kapiti woman’s been visited by a newspaper photographer wanting to mark a notable event in New Zealand’s history, but this year she thought she had outwitted the press with a birthday trip out of town.
‘‘Then you got in touch and I knew the paper had found me,’’ she roared with laughter.
It was a cake covered in dollar signs that began it all.
Pounds and pence became dollars and cents on July 10, 1967, the same day the girl from Island Bay (then Marie Keith) celebrated her 10th birthday.
An uncle phoned The Evening Post, who snapped the birthday girl with her home-made cake – and the rest, as they say, was history.
Marie Summers had become the paper’s ‘Decimal Girl’ or ‘‘Miss Decimal Coinage’’.
Fifty years later, as half a century of the new money is marked, Decimal Girl said she never really understood what the fuss was all about.
‘‘I did feel like a celebrity with my photo on the front page of The Evening Post though.’’
She may be mostly nonplussed about the media attention but she’s startled by how quickly the years have gone by.
‘‘They’ve been a pretty happy 50 years though.’’
This week she recalled the 21st birthday shoot that saw her snapped with a bottle of champagne and the $1 note she had held on to from her 10th birthday.
‘‘It wasn’t my bottle, it was a bottle off the shelf [of her employer] and I had to put it back afterwards.’’
The coverage became part of her life, she said, something to be, reluctantly, expected and accepted.
In 1997, to mark the 30-year anniversary – or ‘‘DC day’’ – The Post caught up with the 40-yearold, who by then had two teenage sons.
‘‘I knew I should have gone away this week, ‘‘ she joked then.
In 2007 when The Dominion Post visited, Summers was about to celebrate her 50th birthday with a quiet family dinner and wasn’t expecting another cake with dollar signs.
‘‘It’s really hard to believe that it’s 40 years since it happened.’’
Asked what she thought about the new 50, 20, and 10 cent coins, introduced the year before, she didn’t mince words.
‘‘I hate them. I have terrible trouble between the 50 and 20 cent coins.’’
Summers may have been the human face of the currency change but the move was a big deal for the whole country.
Decimalisation had been in the works for decades and by the 1960s both National and Labour parties favoured the change.
The National government announced the change in 1963; it would be overseen by future prime minister Rob Muldoon, the under-secretary of finance from 1964.
After the date had been settled on, the next decision was what to call the country’s new currency. Suggestions of crown, fern, Kiwi and zeal were floated but the plain old ‘dollar’ was finally settled on and the government came up with a few novel ways to help New Zealanders get ready.
A cartoon ‘‘Mr Dollar’’ became the face of the transition, and Kiwis were told in a 1966 jingle not to ‘‘shed a tear in July next year for cumbersome pounds and pence’’.
Banks closed for nearly a week so they could organise and convert their records before the big day – 27 million new banknotes and 165 million new coins had been distributed.
The new money was valued at $120 million and weighed more than 700 tonnes. The new coins came in denominations of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 cents.
Initial designs had been criticised by the Royal Mint and images of the proposed new coins that were leaked to the public in early 1966 were also unpopular.
Eventually, the public got the chance to vote for the coins they wanted via forms published in newspapers and James Berry’s designs were chosen for all six coins.
As an attempt to thwart would-be counterfeiters, the notes were kept secret until June 1967.
On the big day, real-size pictures of the new coins and notes were printed on The Dominion‘ s front page .
Fifty years after the occasion, Marie Summers, aka Decimal Girl, aka Miss Decimal Coinage, said she never really cared about the new currency. ‘‘I still don’t,’’ she laughed.
‘‘I did feel like a celebrity with my photo on the front page of The Evening Post though.’’