November 2021 - Melbourne - With the easing of COVID restrictions in Victoria, NPA has put the final touches on its new visitor experience The Protectorate which will be available for school visits in 2022.
“The Protectorate will provide students with a good look at the banknote and passport printing operations of Note Printing Australia, and will also have them explore career options and preferences as they make their way through this attraction,” says CEO Malcolm McDowell. “There are 30 career pathways that run through NPA and students can use the Protectorate Passbook as a guide.”
From a career perspective, there are four major themes within The Protectorate – the Design District, the Technology Sector, the Printing Realm, and the Business Zone. The Protectorate Passbook, manufactured by NPA’s Passports team, is handed out to students at the beginning of the experience and serves as a guidebook through these different areas. It also poses questions in terms of the student’s own career interests and strengths.
“These are a selection of interactive activities as well as many more displays that students will experience. There’s a nice balance between understanding NPA’s history and highlights using multimedia, to appreciating the many exciting and challenging aspects of high security printing that goes into making a banknote or passport,” says Malcolm.
The various interactive activities on offer in The Protectorate include:
Make Your Own Banknote Challenge – visitors receive a piece of coloured substrate and a set of stickers including a portrait, denomination, foil, serial number, signature block and more, and have to design their own banknote without spoiling it!
Puzzle Wall – the design of three different NPA House Notes are scaled up and broken up into a series of magnetic tiles that need to be assembled in the correct order on a magnetic wall in order to display the whole note.
Security Feature Booth – a series of five different categories of security feature are explored in a series of five booths – Ultraviolet, Optically Variable Effects, Geometric Metamerism, Lenticular and Infrared.
Phos Wall – a large wall designed as passport pages and using the backdrop of a glow wall, this display sits in a darkened area where visitors use pen lights to experience phosphorescence and its use in security features.
Printing Plate Display – accompanied by a video showing NPA’s intaglio and polychablon plate making process, the display allows the visitor to touch and feel the key plates in this process: Kapton, Alto, Intaglio and Polychalon.
Games Board - made from recycled banknotes with game board discs made of the same, visitors can challenge each other to a large scale game of Connect 4, Othello, and more.
For further information, school teachers or administrators with an interest in their class visiting The Protectorate in 2022 should contact NPA at theprotectorate@npal.com.au
