Every collection starts somewhere. Mine started with a gift I did not understand at the time.

More than ten years ago my uncle gave me two old banknotes. He was elderly by then, and we were close in the way that sometimes happens between an old man and a much younger relative, without either of us ever saying much about it. The notes were a 100 Rupiah with a rhinoceros on the front, and a 500 Rupiah with a woman holding orchids. Both were from the 1970s, printed years before I was born.

He had kept them in a clear plastic sleeve, wrapped carefully, the way you wrap something you have already decided matters. But he was laughing when he handed the little packet over, as though the whole thing were a joke between us. "Here, I am giving these to you. Look after them properly so you remember me."

I took them home. I put them in a drawer. And then, for a long time, I did nothing at all.

The years I did not look

I want to be honest about this part, because collectors usually tell their origin story as though the interest arrived fully formed. Mine did not.

For years those two notes sat in that drawer, still in their plastic, still wrapped exactly as he had wrapped them. I knew they were there. I never took them out. I never looked at them closely. If you had asked me back then whether I cared about old money, I would have said no, and I would have meant it.

My uncle passed away, and years have passed since then.

Then one night, for no particular reason, I opened that drawer and saw the little packet again.

The night I finally looked

I remember sliding them out slowly, far more carefully than the situation actually required, the way you handle something when it occurs to you for the first time that it might be fragile.

What struck me first was that they still looked new. Not merely well kept. New. The paper was crisp, the colours had not faded, the corners were sharp. Whatever my uncle had done to store them, he had done it right, and he had done it for decades without ever mentioning it.

So I turned the lights up and looked at them properly, probably for the first time in my life.

What I actually saw

The 100 Rupiah has a Javan rhino standing at the edge of the water. I had known that note as a shape and a colour my whole life, but I had never once looked at the animal on it. Up close, the engraving is not a drawing of a rhino. It is thousands of separate cut lines, and the folds of the hide and the weight of the body are built out of nothing but ink and the direction those lines travel. On the reverse the same rhino appears again, this time deep inside a forest of palms and undergrowth, engraved with the same patience.

The 500 Rupiah is finer still. A woman in profile, her hair gathered up, holding white orchids. The flowers are worked petal by petal. Behind her the guilloche opens out into patterns that a machine drew but a person designed, mathematics used as ornament.

On the reverse stands the Bank Indonesia building, every window ruled in.

I sat there far longer than I meant to.

Somewhere in that hour it stopped being a keepsake and started being an object I wanted to understand. Who engraved this. Why a rhino. What else came off that same press. That was the beginning of everything that followed.

Why it is still these two

Since that night I have handled a great many Indonesian banknotes, plenty of them far older and far scarcer than these. The 100 Rupiah and the 500 Rupiah of 1977 are common notes. Any serious collector of Indonesian paper owns both, probably several times over. If you asked me to justify keeping them on catalogue value alone, I could not.

They are still the two I would reach for first.

Part of that is obvious. They came from someone I loved, he wrapped them himself, and the plastic I unwrapped was the plastic he had folded.

But part of it is the notes, and I think that part matters too. The rhino on the 100 Rupiah is a Javan rhino, an animal that now survives in a single national park at the western tip of Java and effectively nowhere else on earth. In 1977 it was simply a national symbol worth putting on the currency. Looking at that same note today, it reads completely differently. The note did not change. What we know changed around it.

That is the thing that has kept me in this hobby. A banknote is a small, ordinary, mass produced object. It is also a country talking about itself at a particular moment, in a medium designed to pass through a million hands without anyone stopping to look at it.

My uncle handed me two of them, laughing, and told me to look after them properly so I would remember him.

I did, eventually. It just took a drawer, several years, and one night with the lights turned up.