My mother, I consider, had an obsession about money being dirty. She was ever watchful. “Get your hands away from your mouth!” she would hiss. “You don’t know where it’s been.” She had her own theories about where it had been, though—her main one being the hands of certain foreigners, who were by definition “dirtier” than our family.

My mother also despised sewing. None of the clothes she made for me had a single unnecessary stitch,which meant no pockets. Since, on occasions, my hands had to be free to ride my bike or to punch cheeky boys, I was forced to store my pen­nies and threepences in my mouth.

If she’d caught me I would have had more than a mouthful.

But I now know that my mother wasn’t on her own. She was under considerable peer pressure to think the way she did. And when she was born early in the century, banknotes were dirty—filthy, according to the reports of public outrage at the time. In those days each trading bank is­sued its own notes, and, motivated by profit rather than regard for pub­lic sensibilities, the banks renewed their notes when they wore out, no sooner.

“The banknotes issued in this Colony are not fit to be handled ex­cept with a pair of tongs,” said Su­preme Court Judge Mr Justice Rich­mond in 1869. “They are calculated to disseminate all sorts of loathsome diseases. Anything so beastly as the paper currency here issued could not be found in any other country in the world.”

Dunedin citizens made plaintive calls to the banks to clean up their notes for the South Seas Interna­tional Exhibition in Dunedin in 1889 “for the sake of the cleanly, respectable people who will shortly be in our midst.” Complaints about “ill-smelling notes” and calls to Par­liament to insist that banks be forced to sterilise their notes continued un­til our central bank, the Reserve Bank, took over sole charge of our banknotes. That was in 1934, and by then my mother, at 22, had the mes­sage that money equalled filth firmly fixed in her brain.

[Chapter-break]

Money. We fret for it and we sweat for it. We invent in­finitely ingenious ways to get it—and spend it. Nowadays, no manufactured item is more carefully produced or maintained than is our country’s currency, yet few products are treated with such disregard. We stuff the notes into our pockets and into jars in our gardens. We run our lawnmowers over them and we put them through our washing ma­chines. But if the ink ran or they turned to pulp in the wash we’d be furious.

“You would hardly believe some of the reasons people give us for the state of their money,” says Bob Nicholas, Senior Officer of the Re­serve Bank’s Auckland branch. He produces something which looks like a fat cigar, but turns out to be a solid, mouldy roll of notes. The ex­planation that accompanies the wad says that these had been buried in a jar under the house, with camphor, two years ago. “When I investigated, I found the camphor in the jar had dissolved and all I was left with was these sodden black notes,” added the owner plaintively.

Notes like these arrive regularly at each of the bank’s three branches, their owners hopeful that good money will be returned for bad. They come in mangled, mushed and occasionally even masticated—”Other bit eaten by rabbit,” the letter accompanying the tatty half of one $20 note tersely explains. Examin­ing these notes, which are some­times little more than crisp ashes, is a job which requires a light touch. Picking delicately through remains of these chewed, burned and other­wise abused notes with tweezers and whatever else is on hand, the examiners assess whether there is enough evidence to enable them to pay out.

Today the owner of the mouldy roll is lucky: staff have managed to separate the notes sufficiently to verify that there is indeed the $5000 claimed. The rabbit owner isn’t so lucky, though: he will get only $10 back of his $20 note.

“It’s what’s missing that’s impor­tant,” Nicholas says. “If we’re sure that no one could present the other part, we’ll pay out. If there’s any chance that someone else could also make a claim, we pay half the face value. As a rule of thumb, if there’s only one serial number, they’ll get only half the value.”

Stashing cash up chimneys, then forgetting about it when lighting the winter fire, is a common reason for the burned notes which are sent to the bank. “And nowadays a lot of people put them under their water mattresses,” Nicholas says. “Unfor­tunately, there’s a heating element under there, and the notes burn.” He laughs, amused at the idea of a waterbed with a fire under it.

Sifting through mutilated money, redeeming it where possible, then getting rid of it, is part of the bank’s task of supplying and maintaining the $1.2 billion cash which floats around our economy. To the bank, there are strong psychological reasons why money should be kept clean. Currency is often the first im­age an outsider has of a country. It’s the window dressing, and it has to be maintained nicely if the country is to look civilised.

Each day the trading banks pour their surplus cash into the Reserve Bank, which peruses and plucks out the notes which they deem should no longer cross our palms.

Over half of the bank’s yearly cash flow—about 500 million banknotes—is checked at the Auck­land branch of the bank, Nicholas explains, leading me to one of the three sorting machines.

Here, workers are feeding bund­les of counted notes into one end of the machine. A laser beam, a sort of magic eye, scans them, assessing re­usability and genuineness. Soiling, tears and defacing will be picked up, as will any odd feature—the lack of a watermark, maybe, or the metallic security strip—which would alert the bank to the possibility of a coun­terfeit.

Each day up to 400,000 notes will be sorted by this machine. Eighty^–six per cent will be reissued, the rest disposed of. Nicholas plucks out one reject which the sorting machine has spat into its “I am puzzled” category, and shows it to me. On one side of the note someone has written, “How do you confuse an Irishman? PTO.” On the other side is the same mes­sage. Even the possibility of a $1000 fine doesn’t deter the amateur artists.

The Queen’s head, sorters tell me, comes in for the most modifications. “With all the things people draw on her head—Edna Everage glasses, moustaches, dreadlocks—she should be glad she’s been taken off most of the new notes,” one worker com­ments. Usually, Nicholas ex­plains, a $5 note will last about a year. “You’d get up to four years out of a $100 note, and somewhere in between for the others. We’re not very hard on our cash. Not like some countries where they tuck them into their shoes or keep them next to their skin.”

Naturally, the doomed notes are not put at the bank’s door in rubbish bags. In the case of the Auckland Reserve Bank, they are destined for one of two giant furnaces lo­cated beneath the bank. Each day, and twice on Fridays, two workers, masked against the ink fumes, stoke up these furnaces into a materialists’ version of hell. I ask one of the stok­ers if it upsets him having to burn all this money. “No problem,” he says cheerfully. “I just throw it in.” I sense that to those who work here, this money long ago stopped being real money.

At the moment, with our new notes coming in, and our old disappearing, there’s an awful lot of money going up in smoke. As we wait for the padlocked doors of a furnace to be opened after the day’s burn, Nicholas estimates that the bank has burned about 40 million notes here over the last year. Once, he says, the bank’s newest recruits were allowed to throw wads of money into these furnaces—a spectacular introduction to the organisation.

The heat, as the doors are opened, pushes me backwards.

Even as ash, the wads of notes have held their shape. Ghostlike, the Queen’s head is still just visible, which somehow seems symbolic of her disappearance from star position on all bar one of our new banknotes, and her retirement into the water­mark.

Today, $2.4 million worth of $5 notes has been burned. These must be New Zealand’s most exquisite fires.

[chapter-break]

The dates is the tenth of July, 1967. Catchy radio and televi­sion jingles that are destined to stay in our brains forever have prepared us well for this day. After months of hype and hoopla, decimal currency has arrived.

The process has not been an easy one.Our national psyche has been humiliated by some of the designs that have been submitted, especially the 50-cent piece with a scene of a high country musterer and dogs. The musterer was realistic enough, but the sheepdogs with him! Stumpy lit­tle things; they looked more like the royal corgis!

That afternoon Reserve Bank offi­cials discover that the two-cent coin—OUR new two-cent coin—has “Bahamas Islands” stamped_. on the head side. Right queen, wrong coun­try. Imagine the chagrin!

It is the sort of mistake that loses someone, somewhere, their job, but makes the hearts of coin collectors beat very quickly.

Treasury immediately recalls the coins, but 40,000 of them have slid through the system. Within days each coin is selling for as much as £75 in London.

In 1992, with our country poised for its fifth national issue of cur­rency, there must be no repeat of that egg-on-the-face incident, and it is the job of the Reserve Bank’s Chief Manager of Currency, Brian Lang, to make sure there are no glitches. An affable man, who has an engaging way of ending conversations with the phrase “good as gold”, he knows that if there is just one mistake on the new notes the nightmare will be his this time. Within minutes of the currency being released, some sharp-eyed collector will pick up any error.

Yet, the rest of us are an unob­servant lot when it comes to recall­ing what is on our most familiar of objects. And that’s official. The Re­serve Bank recently commissioned a street survey, and three out of four people couldn’t name the bird on the reverse of the old $2 note.

Being able to state what is on each note, though, isn’t as important as being able to tell that something is wrong when handed a note with, say, a moa on it. That’s called the recognition factor, and it means that designs have to be clear and simple enough to stay in our minds. Even so, we are still remarkably gullible. Several years ago a reasonably large run of counterfeit twenties was be­ing circulated (“we believe about $250,000 worth,” a police spokes­person said). Photocopied, the smeared results were so poor that the features on the notes were diffi­cult to pick out. It’s hard to see how anyone could have accepted them; but even some trading bank tellers did. (We’re not as gullible as Aus­tralians though—recently they were happily accepting $10 lookalikes with the amount changed to $12,and a photograph of Crocodile Dun­dee star Paul Hogan substituted for the legitimate figure of colonial ar­chitect Francis Greenway).

Pushing a sheet of the new de­signs towards me, Lang comments that these should be easier to re­member, since each of them will carry the face of a famous New Zea­lander. “They’ll stick in your head more than ducks,” he says cheer­fully.

So far only two of the new notes have reached our hands: the five, featuring a craggy Sir Edmund Hillary, and the twenty, with a sud­denly much older Queen Elizabeth. Still to come are the fifty, with Maori leader Sir Apirana Ngata, and the hundred, with the discoverer of the atom’s structure, Ernest Lord Rutherford. These notes will be re­leased in November. Then, next year, for the celebration of women’s suffrage, the ten will be released, with the portrait of suffrage cam­paign leader Kate Sheppard. Behind these faces, though, were 18 months of research, debate and hard deci­sion-making.

The decision to change our note designs came when Thomas De La Rue closed its money printing works in Whangarei in 1990, and New Zea­land then had to put its money-mak­ing out to international tender. The cost to design a new series of notes would be no more than re-making the old, and, anyway, the Reserve Bank decided, it was time for a new image.

“We wanted New Zealanders to be able to pick up these notes and feel proud that they were distinc­tively New Zealand,” Lang says. “We felt it was time to move forward with our own identity.”

Around the world there is a range of motifs for banknotes. Some coun­tries use them for political mes­sages—many presidents insist on appearing on their currency, their portraits becoming constant remind­ers to the money’s user of who is in power. Others, Cuba and Vietnam for example, feature heroic episodes of their wars for independence. Some carry commercial messages. Belize, for instance, with an eye on the tourist trade, has a paradisiacal underwater scene with the words, “Largest barrier reef in the Ameri­cas.” The United States prefers com­plicated symbolic references to sta­bility and peace. Along with Sri Lanka and Singapore, we are known as part of the “flora and fauna set”—birds on one side, heads on the other. One of the main problems this time was: whose heads?

Lang has nursed that debate through the last 18 months.

“Since we wanted more New Zea­land content, the big questions fac­ing us were: Should the Queen be replaced by New Zealanders? If so, by whom? The choices would need to have made a major contribution to New Zealand’s persona. But how should you define a “New Zea­lander”—someone born and bred here, or someone who made a major contribution regardless of where they were born? And finally, should we have only dead—and therefore absolutely predictable—people on the notes?”

How, so to speak, did one decide what a notable person was?

Lang decided to seek public opin­ion. The response was not unpre­dictable. Women wanted a woman, Maori groups a Maori. Canterbury University physicists drummed up a campaign for Rutherford. Someone wanted supermodel Rachel Hunter, and there was a small lobby running for Murray Ball’s famous cartoon character, Dog.

The only very strong reaction against the Queen’s removal came from the Wizard of Christchurch’s guards, Alf’s Imperial Army. The army served outraged notice on the bank, calling the possibility of los­ing the Queen a “heinous conspiracy by the vile Servant of Mammon, Bank Governor Brash, and his cring­ing minions.” When Lang replied that it would be “weak and wrong” for the bank to meet their demands for appeasement—assurance that the Queen would stay, plus a barrel of cool beer (with pump and tap) deliv­ered to regimental headquarters—the army arrived in a 1938 Ford Pre­fect covered with Union Jacks and photographs of Prince Charles to lay siege to the Temple of Mammon.

“In the end,” says Lang, “there was no real groundswel against tak­ing the Queen off and r placing her with New Zealanders.” So the Queen, it was decided, would fade to a shadow of her former self, into the watermark of the new notes, and feature in colour only on the $20. The shortlist for others on the notes included Sir Edmund Hillary—the favourite—along with author Katherine Mansfield, prime minis­ter Richard Seddon, athlete Jack Lovelock, rugby legend George Nepia, politician Sir Apirana Ngata,Lord Rutherford, Kate Sheppard, aviator Jean Batten, anthropologist Peter Buck, Maori King movement leader Te Puea Herangi, and military hero Bernard Freyberg.

It was decided—and this may raise some eyebrows—that Mans­field and Batten had too much scan­dal in their pasts to qualify. The question of who was a “New Zea­lander” eventually came down to the patriotic loyalty of the candi­date. Freyberg dropped out because even though he’d been in New Zea­land since the age of two, his biogra­phy made it clear that he thought of himself as British. On the other hand, Sheppard, who came here in her 20s from Scotland, saw herself as a New Zealander. It was judged that Nepia’s rugby prowess didn’t have the lasting impact that, for bet­ter or worse, Rutherford’s splitting of the atom had.

There is a strong banknote con­vention that only dead people should appear on notes—if a person should blot their copybook it is an embarrassing and costly procedure to get rid of them from the currency. It was a delicate state of affairs for the bank, and could have been for one of our most loved national fig­ures and clear favourite, Sir Edmund, who, in his words, “felt reasonably alive” when asked by Governor Brash if he would agree to being on the note. The implied em­phasis on continuing respectability was no burden, he says. “I’ve been watching my Ps and Qs for years.”

By a process of research and de­bate, then, the decisions were made. Throughout the process, suggestions for design content and research of the factual detail of the notes were handled by Wellington designer Lindsay Missen, along with Reserve Bank staff and a research team made up of Professor W. H. Oliver, former editor of the Dictionary of New Zea­land Biography, Dr John Andrews of Victoria University’s School of Bio­logical Sciences, Ben Morgan and Lou Ormsby. These people collected thousands of research items over 1991, and their attention to detail has been formidable.

At his Cuba Street studio Missen pulls out his files. In one folder there are 30, maybe 40, photographs of the native falcon, the karearea. They show the birds in dozens of rest and flight positions. Written references on the kokako give such morsels as “since the bird displays remarkable, squirrel-like climbing ability, its ag­ile legs should be shown to good effect.” Inside another folder there are 23 photographs of a grass used in one small scene, every stage of its development relentlessly recorded.

On the $10 note a white camellia accompanies Kate Sheppard, but finding the right one almost defeated the team. Keen gardeners had long since uprooted that particular vari­ety, given by women to the MPs who supported the 1893 Bill which gave women the vote. With the camellia season almost over, the pressure was on to find the right flower in time. Experts around the country joined the search, and, at the eleventh hour, the perfect, fragile blooms were dis­covered in Dunedin’s Botanic Gar­dens.

[Chapter-break]

A Flimsy chain stretches be­tween two pillars at the grand portals of Thomas De La Rue’s British office—the only ob­vious sign of security. It is not there, it turns out, to prevent burglary but to discourage vehicles from drawing up to the aristocratic porch and de­positing oil stains on the crunchy new gravel.

“We only take it off when an offi­cial visitor is due to arrive—an am­bassador or someone like that. We can’t have them splashing through grease,” says the deputy managing director, David Hosie. That sense of fastidious care and British discre­tion pervades the air at the head­quarters of the world’s biggest sup­plier of banknotes, in Basingstoke, south-west of London.

Inside, the presence of any in­truder would be detected by elec­tronic sensors, judiciously hidden so as not to distract employees and guests as they walk around the ground floor, enjoying the specially created atmosphere of a continental village, complete with tree-lined boulevard, cafés and shops.

Upstairs, in the hushed design department, Richard Jebbitt can con­centrate on meticulously copying the photograph of a camellia petal—that elusive camellia—dot by dot, for what is known as a vignette, a small piece of engraved decoration. He looks tired, as well he might; he has been stippling away on these ca­mellias for almost five weeks, and he has been nursing the New Zea­land project for almost a year.

In a company renowned for its traditions and long-serving staff Jebbitt is a relative newcomer. He used to be an artist, illustrating ani­mals, but joined Thomas De La Rue because he wanted to make money. Five years on, he is making New Zealand’s money. It is his first time in charge of an issue as big as this.

On his desk is evidence of the slow evolution of early ideas: large cardboard versions since discarded. Most prominent on top of the pile is a pink note bearing the portrait of Katherine Mansfield, now dropped. At least he had known something about her, he says. He had never heard of most of the other New Zea­landers who were chosen to repre­sent the country.

It is Jebbitt’s job to take Missen’s designs and “banknotise” them—make fine adjustments to the design and add features which will ensure they fit the rigid security require­ments of a banknote.

A few changes had to be made—partly for the sake of decorum. For instance, the tractor that accompa­nies Sir Edmund’s portrait on the five-dollar note had to be moved from the upper right hand side to the lower left. On the right is the watermark with the Queen’s por­trait; she would not have looked suf­ficiently regal with farm machinery suspended above the crown jewels. One of Jebbitt’s early versions of Mt Cook had bare rock all the way to the summit; for the sake of realism a layer of virgin snow was added. (During the time he was drawing it, the top fell off the real mountain. Fortunately, his reference photo­graph had been taken from an angle unaffected by the rockfall )

Jebbitt’s drafts then went back to the Reserve Bank, and the painstak­ing process of revision and re-revi­sion began.

On the whole, though, the final designs are very close to those sup­plied by Missen. The company’s main function in this case has been to ensure that the notes contain the proper security features.

The threat from forgeries has be­come much greater since the advent of colour photocopiers, and every week the company’s security evalu­ation executive, James Robinson, re­ceives samples of counterfeit notes from police around the world. In the past seven years since he has been doing this job he has seen only one from New Zealand, “a typical and mediocre” ef­fort which failed to repro­duce the true colours and the intricacy of some of the patterns.

“We have to stay one step ahead, constantly making the counterfeiter’s job more onerous,” he says.

A tidy, clean-cut man, he picks his words carefully, like a policeman in court, as he sips a soft drink in the tastefully furnished club rooms. The soothing sound of Acker Bilk can be heard in the background, along with an incongruous clatter of coins as someone hits the jackpot on the poker ma­chines.

Robinson heads a team of 20 scientists who look at ways of making the manu­facture of notes ever more complex and difficult to imitate.

Certain colour combina­tions, for example, are needed to deter the would-be forger. Quite what they are, Thomas De La Rue is disinclined to divulge. When it comes to questions of security, the air of discre­tion can become a cloud of secrecy. Suffice to say that the colour of some of the flowers had to be altered. Other features are more easy to un­derstand. Take our new $5 note, for instance. The metallic strip is easy to see, as is the Queen’s head in the watermark. When the note is held up to the light it becomes obvious that the perfect register of some parts of the note on both sides would be almost impossible to duplicate—on the left hand bottom corner the fern matches exactly its mirror image on the other side, while lines at each corner dovetail with others on the reverse.

Under a magnifying glass the mi­cro-letters RBNZ become visible in the strip under Sir Edmund, and, held flat to the eye, the letters NZ emerge from the oval pattern above the top number. This is only the first, public layer of precautions. All notes contain “spectral finger print­ing”—hidden images which are only visible under ultraviolet light. On our five-dollar note, under UV the eye of the yellow-eyed penguin sud­denly fluoresces, and the grass at its feet twinkles prettily. And every en­graved portion of the note—in this case Sir Edmund, the lettering and the pattern at the top right of the note—is printed by a process which leaves a raised surface.

The engraving work is probably the most painstakingly specialised part of the notemaking process, and is performed by only a handful of people in the world.

On the ground floor at Thomas De La Rue there is a row of mechani­cal engravers, looking like ancient, menacing dentistry drills. Some ba­sic decorative work is done by these machines; everything else is done by hand.

Steel engravers are a rare ilk and hard to come by. There’s no way to shortcut the engraver’s 12- to 15-year apprenticeship. Although these arti­sans work with both eyes open, one will develop much more than the other, which will become lazy. And because of their work, engravers can read a paper held up to a mirror more quickly than most people could read it the normal way. All their professional life is spent work­ing back to front. Everything is done backwards, text and all.

There are engravers responsible solely for lettering and patterns, en­gravers who make the vignettes, and engravers with something approach­ing celebrity status who do only por­traits. One of the most celebrated is the aptly named Terry Chipper, who was responsible for Sir Edmund and the new updated Queen. He is one of an elite group: there are only about a dozen portrait engravers in the world.

Chipper began training as a stu­dent in 1947, became an apprentice in 1950, and worked his way up through lettering, vignettes and fi­nally to portraits. Up until now Thomas De La Rue’s portraits of the Queen have usually been engraved by someone more senior still, but the royalty specialist Stan Doubtfire is now 70, and semi-retired, and Chipper, who is a comparatively youthful 57, quips, “Perhaps this means I am finally taking over from Stan.”

The Queen took him more than two months to complete, a quite usual length of time. He has to copy a photograph by eye. Every tone has to be represented by a multitude of tiny, delicate incisions in the steel plate. A metal image cannot be re­duced as a photograph can, so the engraving has to be the actual size of the final picture—barely two inches high. Chipper achieves extraordi­nary clarity of detail—the Queen’s teeth, for example, which, unusu­ally, are clearly visible in this por­trait.

Chipper works from home, sitting at a small desk with his mongrel dog Sadie by his brown-slippered feet and Vaughan Williams on the record player. It is a tidy, modern, single-storeyed house which wouldn’t look out of place in one of Christchurch’s more upmarket suburbs, but its loca­tion, somewhere in England, cannot be revealed for security purposes. His scrapbook alone would be of great interest to a collector; he has copies of everything he has en­graved, from the Queen to Surinam’s only Olympic swimmer.

An artist who works diligently from 8am to 5.30pm, Chipper is dedicated to his exacting craft, and, he says, is still learning. Hillary, for instance, must have presented a rig­orous challenge. The photograph from which Chipper worked is of a young Sir Edmund, fresh off Ever­est, jubilant but unshaven. Stubble is hard to reproduce without giving a smudged and dirty appearance. Chipper says he aimed for a “rugged masculine look” by using clear, deep engraving lines, particularly around the jaw.

Fortunately, he made no mistakes with either of his portraits for the New Zealand issue. Changes to minute etchings on thick-plated steel are not straightforward to achieve. The engraver has to scrape away the offending lines, making a hollow on the plate. Thomas De La Rue’s alterations department then marks the precise spot on the back of the plate and gives it a hefty punch, and the engraver reworks that portion.

More often, engravings have to be re-done for reasons other than those of the engraver’s own making. A president or head of state some­where is deposed or murdered, and a new face is needed on the cur­rency. “Yes, it’s a fascinating busi­ness because of its political con­tent,” says David Hosie. “Every night you turn on the television, and it’s possible you’ll see another cus­tomer going up in smoke.” For rea­sons like that—although Thomas De La Ruvians would be the last ones to discuss such indelicate matters—cli­ents pay for their goods up front. And in hard currency.

Thomas De La Rue makes notes for 100 countries—six billion notes a year. When the Soviet bloc started to crumble, whole new money-mak­ing vistas were opened up. Thomas De La Rue is not out there hustling for the new custom; it is not like that. But it does have “its ear to the ground”, is “putting out feelers”, and Hosie says, with a discernible glint in his eye, that if all the exist­ing former Soviet states became sin­gle-currency countries, there would be 23 more potential clients.

Printing money is a business which has been built on the old-fashioned virtues of solidity and re­straint, or at least the appearance of these virtues. Inside the front door are two grey-haired, kindly-looking security guards. The guards provide the only gap in the armour of discre­tion. Security controller Peter Henshaw recognises me as a New Zealander and accosts me on the way out: “I don’t like your new Queen,” he says jovially. “Too many teeth.”

[Chapter-break]

The atmosphere at the compa­ny’s printing works in Singa­pore has an almost palpable hard edge to it. A high spiked fence surrounds the facility, which looks like a military blockhouse, and there is a noticeable lack of windows. A heavily-armed Gurkha guard stands watchfully by the entrance.

Security controller Jim Tate is a bluff Englishman who fondly re­members some years he spent as one of the Queen’s guards. In his office a sign says: “Trust but verify.”

One senses that this is an uncom­fortable exercise for Tate. His job is to think like a terrorist, and make sure he’s always one jump ahead. And visitors—especially those with cameras—represent the unpredict­able. More so than the employees.

“We have a very good un­derstanding of what people are,” he says, “how they can be tempted, and what they are likely to do. I say to anyone who joins here, ‘Everyone has their price. Everyone.’ When they disagree, I say, ‘How about if your mother was dying, and the only way she could be cured was to send her to New York for an operation, and you couldn’t find the money to send her? What about that?’ My job is to make sure that whatever the pressure on an employee, the system is invinci­ble.”

On the factory floor there is am­ple evidence of that vigilance. Un­der bank upon bank of bright fluo­rescent lights, the printing presses thumping around us, a hundred or so workers mix inks, tend presses, check notes. Overhead, hundreds of cameras look down on them. At the end of each day each worker will be searched by deft hands, while ears listen for the crackle of crisp new paper. As general manager Andrew Blundell shows me through the fac­tory, one of the uniformed guards strolling quietly around the factory floor courteously asks to look through my notepad. She fans through and hands it back. It is a sobering reminder not to get carried away by the sight of these millions of dollars pouring steadily from ma­chines around me.

Blundell peels a sheet of blank paper off a stack. “Currency paper is not, in fact, paper,” he tells me. “It is made of cotton, and made to last.” Thomas De La Rue makes sure of that. Their notes are continually subjected to scrunching, tearing and folding tests, and exposed to human sweat, laundry detergents, dry cleaning fluids. Recently, another banknote company produced West­ern Samoa’s new notes—printed on plastic. Within weeks, the ink came off, starting with the portrait of the head of state. A banknote company’s credibility is only as good as its notes.

When Blundell holds this sheet up to the light our watermark, the Queen’s head, and the new glittering security thread become visible. Both are built into the paper when it is made.

“Every inch of this paper is ac­counted for at every stage of the process,” he says. “This is a precise business. This is not a business where you order a million pieces of paper and get a million and one.” He pauses to make sure he is making his point about the tightness of in­ternal security. “You get one million, precisely. And if the amount of pa­per that comes out of this machine is less than what we put in, we’ll take the machine apart to look for the rest. And every offcut, every piece of faulty printing, is burned under su­pervision.”

The value of the money being printed is not relevant here, it is pieces of paper which count. Each year up to 1000 million pieces roll off the presses of this factory; the New Zealand order is for 125 mil­lion pieces, 80 million of those our $20 and $10 notes.

Today, five currencies are going through the factory, and it is only when we get to the intaglio printing machine that we see our first sheets of New Zealand $20 notes. All the background colours have already been printed on them by a litho­graphic process which prints both sides simultaneously and gives per­fect back and front registration of the security features. The engraved portions will be added at this ma­chine, and, later, the security inked areas and, finally, the numbers.

Here, Chipper’s art is finally be­ing brought to life. Four working plates made from copies of the origi­nal engravings have been wrapped around a spinning drum. As the drum turns the plates are coated with thick sticky ink. Their surfaces are then wiped, leaving ink only in the incisions. Then, a sheet of paper is squeezed on to the plate at a pres­sure of about 40 tons per square inch, and when the paper is pulled away tiny mounds of ink remain. It is these which give our notes their embossed texture, and give blind people vital clues to distinguish be­tween denominations.

Sheet after sheet of the twenties-40 to each sheet—float gently down on to a growing stack. They are handsome notes, and I feel a rush of patriotic pride. “Lovely, aren’t they, when they’re in sheet form?” Blundell says as I watch, mesmer­ised, the equivalent of my entire year’s salary passing before my eyes in seconds. To him they represent a successful and stylish product. To me they are apartments in the world’s top cities, and wondrous journeys through sun-drenched lands.

Mistakes do, of course, happen—that’s the nature of the printing busi­ness. Preventing them from sneak­ing through the system into the ea­ger hands of collectors is the critical part of the process. In a corner of the factory 25 Singaporean women are checking the uncut sheets, their eyes scanning right top to left bottom of each sheet, looking for spots or smears. All the notes that pass this test will go on to be cut and num­bered before their final check in the single note room. In this room the security presence is intense, the presence of rows of cameras and rov­ing guards unable to be ignored.

“This is where it turns into real money,” Blundell says, by way of explanation. The concentration on the faces of the rows of women checking the notes is just as intense. Carefully, they fan a bundle of notes like a hand of cards. Then they riffle through it—expert dealers in an ex­clusive casino. I am reminded of the childhood game of drawing stick fig­ures on pads and flicking through the pages. Just as the stick figure jumps and somersaults because each is advanced one movement, so too will any shift in the pattern’s regis­ter, any odd mark leap out at the inspector.

“They flick through the bundles seven times,” says Blundell, “twice for the back of the note, five times for the front—the side that carries most of the note’s information.”

I ask one of the women how many times she will look at Sir Edmund’s face today. She calculates: 320 bun­dles, or bricks, of 1000 notes each day, so that’s 320,000 times. Does she know who he is? “As yet, no,” she says, smiling.

As I watch these bricks of notes being packed into boxes for deliv­ery-50,000 of them at a time—I try to calculate how much money I’m looking at. A quarter of a million dollars to the box, a pile of boxes as big as a small house. The closest I can get is millions—and millions—enough, maybe, to buy another Clyde Dam, maybe even a frigate or two. Each of these notes costs six cents to make—so will the tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. Nice mark-up. At this cost, it seems like a pretty good return on our invest­ment. One of the world’s last great bargains.

I am back in Auckland, and the cold winds licking my face instead of the 32-degree heat of Singapore tell me so. I seek warmth in a café, and across from me is a table of teen­agers. One of the girls pulls out a new five-dollar note. It doesn’t rip, she tells a friend. “It does,” he says, snatching it from her. The pressure he applies would tear a phone book in half. It rips. He holds it above his head tauntingly, waving the two pieces. Oh, well. The Reserve Bank has millions of replacements. If she can get the two halves from him,that is.