ON Sunday, any of you sitting down in your home or your local pub or club for a quiet drink, please raise your glass and toast my favourite uncle, the late Gordon Andrews.
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I certainly will be. Such is my pride - Australia's pride - in the efforts of this gifted designer who changed all our lives.
Sunday, February 14, is the 50th anniversary of the introduction of decimal currency in Australia and Gordon, as he was known in the Andrews family, created the new banknotes.
He threw the conservative, boring ideas of the past out the window and replaced them with bright, innovative designs.
All the world, with the exception of the United States, soon followed suit.
Some of our family thought Gordo was a bit eccentric.
Luckily the people who counted reckoned otherwise, seeing him as innovative - a trailblazer in design.
His dad, my grandfather, Edwin "Young Ted" Andrews recognised his talents from an early age and had a 14-year-old Gordon design the kitchen of the family home in Ashfield, with revolutionary terrazzo-topped benches and table tops.
One of them holds pride of place in my Port Macquarie home - as do many other mementoes of the great man.
David Jones used him in the 1940s to design the store's distinctive "running writing" logo.
The boffins in Canberra commissioned him to create the Australian pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain, a world expo.
Olivetti typewriters had him design their showrooms around Europe.
The Reserve Bank of Australia asked him to conceive its logo.
However the crowning glory was his concept of the decimal currency banknotes.
He wanted Carolyn Chisholm on the first $10 note, but some bureaucrat vetoed his selection.
It was only after an outcry from the public about the lack of women that Gordon got his way and she appeared on the $5 - a later addition to the notes.
He created the first $100 note, but when the Federal Government thought this would make people think inflation was rampant he had to re-craft the engraving to make it a $50 note.
Yes, he did the engraving as well as the designs.
When the time came for a $100 note they would only use him as a consultant - because he had reached retiring age.
"You're worried I may cark it before I finish the job," he quipped.
"Actually, yes!" came the reply.
But a quarter of a century later they came back to him, cap in hand, asking him to design the Coat of Arms in the new Parliament House.
His one real regret was he never got to design the plastic notes we now use.
Just before his death he told me: "Now, when I go into the bank to get my money, it's no longer my money."
