Collection PL

Fiji’s paper currency traces the layered history of British colonial administration in the Pacific. Before the Second World War, the islands relied on sterling shipments printed by London firms such as Thomas De La Rue & Company and on the wider reserve note network of New Zealand. When Japanese expansion across the Pacific disrupted those routes in 1942, the British authorities in Suva were forced to improvise.

Their solution was pragmatic and urgent: to overprint existing New Zealand Reserve Bank £1 notes with bold black text reading “GOVERNMENT OF FIJI.” These modified notes entered circulation as legal tender for the colony and its military garrisons. Though the host note retained its New Zealand design and crowned watermark, the overprint transformed it into Fiji’s de facto wartime currency. Each was hand-inspected, numbered, and released through local treasuries as shipping shortages made replacement impossible.

The surviving 1942 Fiji £1 (Pick 45c) encapsulates the improvisation of empire under stress: a New Zealand note printed by De La Rue, overprinted in Fiji, circulated under British authority, and withdrawn after the war when standard production resumed. Its paper bears the wear of a tropical economy at war—sun, humidity, and constant exchange—but its existence documents one of the rarest and most historically charged emergency issues of the Pacific theatre.

The Fiji section of this collection begins with that single note: a bridge between London’s print rooms, New Zealand’s reserve system, and the wartime Pacific outpost that relied on both. Further additions will follow the lineage through post-war crown issues and the early independence series of 1970.