1 Pound

The Bank of Fiji was a short-lived private institution established in Levuka — then the colonial capital before Suva — and this 1871 Pound is among the earliest banknotes ever issued for Fijian circulation. Fiji had not yet been formally annexed by Britain; that cession came in 1874. A private bank printing currency in a territory without a colonial monetary framework was not unusual for the Pacific at the time, but it made redemption guarantees essentially dependent on the bank's own solvency rather than any Crown backing.

S. T. Leigh & Co. were primarily a Sydney printing and stationery firm, not specialist security printers — which may account for why surviving examples show relatively modest anti-forgery features compared to contemporaneous colonial issues from Perkins Bacon or similar houses.