Bucking the system
As decimal currency marks its 50th anniversary, Rob Stock looks at the designs that didn’t make it, the feuding and how we could have had the Zeal instead of the dollar.
‘Don’t shed a tear in July next year, for cumbersome pounds and pence,’’ the decimal currency song trilled out of TV sets in the mid 60s.
The nation was gearing up to switch from shillings and pounds to dollars and cents, and the many doubters needed to be convinced.
The new system of money would be too complex and confuse shoppers, critics argued, and shopkeepers would inflate their prices.
But modernisation won out in the end, and on July 10, 1967, New Zealand joined the dollar club of nations.
Many historians now see it as an important step along the road to the modern New Zealand we know today, as we tilted our gaze away from mother England, and helping usher in a more self-assured national identity.
We might have turned our back on the club of dollar nations, including the United States, Australia and Canada, and adopted our very own form of currency called the Zeal, had it not been for a pugnacious young finance minister.
Robert Muldoon was not keen on the idea of giving our currency a distinctively New Zealand name. Others suggested and rejected include the ‘crown’, ‘fern’, ‘tui’, and ‘kiwi’.
The country hadn’t been in a hurry to decimalise, lagging Australia by a year, India and Japan by a decade, staunchly resisting calls from Rex Mason, known in coin-collector circles as the father of decimal currency and one of New Zealand’s longestsitting Labour MPs.
Once the dollar had won out over the curiously named Zeal, the next big question was how it would look.
In the run-up to decimalisation, some of the proposed designs were leaked to the press, including a crudely drawn one of a rugby player on a 20-cent coin.
An outcry followed, especially from Canterbury, because the player appeared to be wearing an Auckland jersey, says Robert Pepping, a numismatist, who studies coins and banknotes.
Muldoon was suspected of being behind the leak.
He then staged a public relations exercise, calling for the populace to vote on their favourite designs.
The winning entries were, for the first time, conceived and developed in New Zealand, though the designer, James Berry, was a British immigrant.
Although there was no denying Berry’s competence, it was arguable better designs were overlooked by a conservative nation, Stocker said in 2006.
These included those by artist Paul Beadle, including his stunning kotuku, or white heron.
Beadle effectively ruled himself out of the running by calling Muldoon ‘‘a flabby, putty-like slob’’ and Treasury a ‘‘bunch of nincompoops’’.
The more gracious Eileen Mayo offered her awesome swordfish, but was snubbed by the public.
Some, today, wonder if New Zealand was too conservative in its choices.
Art historians such as Dr Mark Stocker, Te Papa’s curator for historical art, believe Kiwis made a ‘‘safe’’ choice in 1967, and turned down designs that may have proved more popular today.
A conservative choice was always on the cards.
Muldoon was a social conservative, and currency design has always been about function over artistic merit, and winning broad public support.
There’s a fair bit that goes into designing a banknote.
Matthew Wright from the Reserve Bank says that’s not changed since New Zealand first got its own currency, in 1933.
‘‘Currency has to be distinctive and with clear New Zealand visual themes, accessible, able to stand up to regular handling, resistant to being counterfeited, and with a professional design that both reflects its purpose as legal tender, and which is likely to appeal to a wide range of the public.’’
The main motifs remain largely unchanged: unique flora and fauna, Maori iconography (sometimes used without consultation), the Queen, and the landscape.
Unlike the decimal changeover of 1967, the country’s first notes and coins were born out of desperation, rather than aspiration.
In 1933, the global depression
We’ve done pretty well in terms of artistic merit. Numismatist Robert Pepping
was reshaping the world economy.
New Zealand, still using British currency, devalued to make agricultural exports cheaper.
That meant New Zealand’s British currency would be instantly worth 25 per cent more overseas. A lot was smuggled out, leading to a shortage and a desperate need for our own money.
‘‘People were stuffing their pockets with it when they went to Australia, or England,’’ says Pepping.
New Zealand’s first coins were immediately embraced by a relieved populace as a symbol of nationhood, partly a reaction to having to stomach pocketfuls of change from their near rival.
The bold Kiwi icons of birdlife, Maori and landscape on the 1933 currency were an assertion of our unique identity, Pepping says.
Kiwis old enough to remember the dignified tui pennies that circulated before we went decimal will remember them as authentic Kiwiana.
Galt says the designs stood out in an era when British coinage was distinctly heraldic and conservative in design.
Banknotes and coins reflect the societies using them. The 1940 banknote series, which replaced the ‘‘temporary’’ 1933 notes, had themes reflecting the mindset and social context of the day, says Wright.
The New Zealand state was celebrating its centenary year, and Captain James Cook featured prominently on the notes, along with characteristic New Zealand scenes and plants, and a vignette of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on the reverse, says Wright.
When the decimal notes were designed in the mid-1960s, the Treaty was dropped.
And with the Maori cultural and political renaissance still some years away, the Treaty made a reappearance only on a commemorative $10 issued for the 150th anniversary of the signing, celebrating it as a historical event.
‘‘It wasn’t until the 1990s that the original decimal design themes were 25 years old and beginning to show their ‘period’ styling,’’ Wright says.
‘‘New Zealand was emerging from its ‘mid-century’ mindset on many levels, and a different selection of themes seemed appropriate.’’
In 1999, the boldest banknote redesign yet took place. This is when prominent New Zealand
figures such as Lord Ernest Rutherford, Kate Sheppard and Sir Apirana Ngata made their first appearances, on notes made for the first time from polymer, which made them more durable, and harder to forge.
The themes of flora and fauna continued the unbroken tradition started in 1933, but in a bold move, Sir Edmund Hillary appeared on the new $5 note, breaking the tradition of the monarch being the only living person to make it on to our currency.
Having previously been on all New Zealand banknotes, the Queen was suddenly relegated to the $20 note only, prompting a bit of an outcry from some sections of the public who feared she might soon be left off entirely.
Monarchist League chairman Noel Cox says the Reserve Bank was not making an anti-monarchy political statement. If anything, its rather casual approach to the Queen reflected the attitudes of society.
‘‘It was just a redesign to them,’’ Cox says. ‘‘This wasn’t an attempt by the Reserve Bank to remove the Queen’s image. They didn’t consider it that way.’’
Cox said the Reserve Bank pointed out at the time that the Queen remained on all the coins.
When planning for our current set of banknotes released last year – our seventh series – the tradition of spatting over designs wasn’t repeated. These were 21st century technocratic updates that improved notes’ security features.
The faces remained the same. But new design techniques such as a holographic window, featuring a map of New Zealand and the same bird which appears on the note, gave the currency a particularly modern look.
Pepping feels we’ve ended up with coins and banknotes the country can be proud of.
‘‘We’ve done pretty well in terms of artistic merit,’’ he says.
Galt feels the same, but both have a collector’s desire to see us issue more commemorative notes and coins, such as the 2015 Anzac 50 cent pieces.
It would make our handfuls of change and wallet contents more exciting, and give us a chance to celebrate more of our culture and most cherished leaders, so long as they are good and dead, and don’t provoke too much controversy.
A footnote to the decimalisation story is that imperial currency never entirely disappeared.
Many examples were kept as souvenirs, and remain in private hands to this day.
The Reserve Bank figures show £5 million worth was never handed in. There are 48,800 £10 notes unaccounted for, and a staggering 1.5 million £1 notes.
And if you had one of those tenners, you have the right to rock up to the Reserve Bank, and ask for it to be swapped for dollars and cents. However, it’d probably be worth a whole lot more at auction.