Island Airmail: Sunday Stamps

This Sunday I heart post comes to you direct from my Dad's study. I am home visiting  my parents, and also my sister who has just flown back to Australia after living in Sweden for the past couple of years. (Welcome home Elspeth!). So for this week's Sunday Stamps, I decided to flick through my Dad's collection of First Day Covers from when he was a boy, to find something suitable for the theme of 'the post'. Any regular readers of this blog would know that I am particularly fond of 'post' and choose to define it broadly.

Although I did not find any stamps with post boxes or stamps on them - I did find two covers celebrating airmail. The one above is from Western Samoa (which has now dropped the 'Western' from its name and is officially the Independent State of Samoa).

Also within Dad's collection I found another contemporaneous cover celebrating airmail from Papua and New Guinea, also issued in July 1970.

The stamps are very nice, with the planes flying over volcanoes (after my recent trip to Indonesia I am most definitely into volcanoes: almost to the point of starting a second blog called "I heart volcanoes"). But the other thing I like about the PNG cover is the stylised image of Australia and Papua and New Guinea linked by the plane. Pretty cool. 

I am seriously starting to wonder why I loved just plain old stamps all these years, when I could have been loving first day covers, which are stamps with the added bonus of designs on envelopes and fancy postmarks. Who knows why I was so slow to catch on, but the important thing is now my passion for post has enlarged to definitely include FDCs. And when airmail and volcanoes are involved, it is just the icing on top!

For other post related blogs this weekend, check out Viridian's Sunday Stamps through the button above. Happy Sunday!