A quarter of a century after it was stolen, a Hawke's Bay man finally has his wallet back - without any money stolen.
"I didn't ever carry any money in my wallet because I had none," Michael Hardy told RNZ's Checkpoint on Wednesday.
A clean-up crew clearing trees toppled in Cyclone Gabrielle unearthed the wallet in a Hastings park.
Then in a typically Kiwi way, its owner was tracked down via someone who knew someone else, who lived next to Hardy's daughter.
Back in the late 1990s, Hardy's car was parked outside the Hastings cemetery.
"The window was broken, the glove box was broken into, the wallet was gone. We had a quick look at the cemetery thinking it might be there, but she or whoever flogged it didn't do that."
No one handed it into the police, and as the years passed, Hardy forgot all about it. When he was contacted about the wallet, his son had to remind him of the theft.
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While the outside of the wallet was filthy, its contents were completely intact. Whoever stole it clearly had no interest in what it contained - a paper driver's licence, a Diners Club card, a Westpac card and a life membership for the Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust.
"It was a life membership that you paid for, it wasn't awarded. So in other words, it saved paying an annual licence fee for the rest of my life."
Hardy said while "so little good, no good at all" had come out of Cyclone Gabrielle, he hoped his story "cheers somebody up".
"You know, we were relatively unaffected. Sure, we have had damage but it's nothing to what other people have had."
To this day, he still does not carry cash.