It’s a hard job pleasing anyone with design work. Everyone’s an artist and everyone’s got an opinion. But whether or not you think the new-look $5 note is aesthetically pleasing, it’s raised genuine debate about who gets to feature on our national currency.
The Reserve Bank last proposed changing our smallest currency note in 1992, replacing Caroline Chisholm with Queen Elizabeth II.
I had just turned 13 and felt passionately that this was a mistake – a slap in the face to Australian feminists and those who work with the poorest and most underprivileged in society.
Caroline Chisholm was an incredible woman, and in an acute parallel for us today, she was the “immigrant’s friend”. She helped poor young women and children who arrived in Australia without employment or family or friends and ended up working on the streets. Unusually for her time, she also successfully lobbied government for better conditions for migrants.
Back in 1992, I was incensed and in a small act of polite but impassioned protest, I turned to one of the few techniques available to me as a teenager living in Tasmania in the pre-internet world. Spurred on by the angst of top charting Boyz II Men’s End of the Road, I wrote to the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, who was then Bernie Fraser.
I recently found his letter of reply, remarkably hand signed, kindly explaining that really Caroline Chisholm was lucky to have had a run, but now it was time, while maintaining a balance of men and women on our notes, to acknowledge other distinguished Australians. And so that famous Australian, Queen Elizabeth was placed on our pink note.
On the one hand, it’s a small matter – it’s a piece of plastic that doesn’t buy very much these days. But like the Australian of the Year awards or other national symbols, it reflects who we are as a nation and how we want to be represented. It’s a pointer to the unresolved question of our Australian identity.
It’s also something people surprisingly care passionately about. In the UK, journalist Caroline Criado-Perez ran a successful campaign to make the Bank of England feature Jane Austen on their £10 note and avoid a situation where the Queen would have been the sole woman featured on any British currency.
Criado-Perez’s Change.org petition attracted around 30,000 votes of support, but astonishingly she was trolled and received rape and death threats for her actions. The controversy led to charges being laid against the individuals involved.
Here in Australia, the outrageous gender imbalance of our notes has been corrected (in the notes of my childhood, there were just two women featured – the Queen and Caroline Chisholm), and we now feature five women and four men.
But if you take time to look at your notes, with the exception of Ngarrindjeri man David Unaipon, it’s a pretty monocultural, fairly outdated cast. People like Sir John Monash, Banjo Paterson, Mary Reibey, Dame Nellie Melba. All remarkable and excellent in their fields, but arguably of growing irrelevance to Australians today who are living in a culturally diverse, global and technology-enabled community.
I’ll leave others to debate the merits of each individual but it’s the selection criteria that matter – why not let the people decide? Why not have notes that reflect our multicultural community and celebrate the contribution of refugees, people with disabilities, or transgendered people?
While the Queen featuring on the lowest domination of the notes may have a technical precedent, let’s face it, she’s on every coin we use. Surely we could make a captain’s call and decide it’s time for a fresh face.
The Queen feels as culturally relevant to me as she did in 1992, and, along with Boyz II Men, she’s even more irrelevant to today’s 13-year-old Australians. Both hold complete lack of cultural currency, if you’ll forgive the expression. Things change. The $5 note is being redesigned. It’s is an expensive exercise so let’s look at our real cultural heroes and make it count.
