1 Dollar - Elizabeth II 4th Portrait; Kupe

Kupe is the Māori navigator credited in oral tradition with the discovery of Aotearoa, likely around the 10th century, though the precise chronology remains debated among scholars. New Zealand's commemorative programme has periodically returned to Kupe as a subject precisely because his story sits at the intersection of Polynesian wayfinding history and national identity politics — neither straightforwardly mythological nor historically documented in the European sense.

The fourth portrait of Elizabeth II, by Ian Rank-Broadley, was introduced on New Zealand coinage in 1999 and remained current until the transition following her death in 2022.