3 Dollars

The Cook Islands Monetary Board issued this note under the territory's unusual arrangement — Cook Islands uses the New Zealand dollar as its primary circulating currency, making domestically issued Cook Islands dollars a parallel system that functions legally but rarely sees ordinary transactional use. Most notes from this board end up in collector hands rather than tills.

The 3-dollar denomination is itself a deliberate oddity, chosen partly to attract philatelic interest. De La Rue's production quality is consistent with their Pacific regional work of the period, though the watermark security on this series is relatively minimal by contemporary standards.