Sunday Stamps: Architecture, not Horseracing

Flicking through my collection this week searching for stamps featuring architecture, the theme of this weeks Sunday Stamps, I was slighty dismayed about the disproportionate number of horse-racing stamps Australia has issued over the years compared to stamps on architecture. Even for a sporting nation such as ours, I was surprised to see so many horse stamps. Although I should hardly be shocked, given I live in a city that has a public holiday for a horse race: on the First Tuesday in November for Melbourne Cup, aka 'the race that stops the nation'.

Anyhow, Australian stamps make up the heart and soul of my collection, and I so I desperately wanted to be able to showcase some Australian architecture for Sunday Stamps, but for a moment I thought Australia Post was going to let me down. Then I went back to Grandma Nellie's stamp collection and found these gems from the 70s.

The stamps were issued in October 1973. The Sydney Opera House is an obvious choice for an Australian Architecture stamp, and the blue 7c issue was the standard postal rate at that time. Melbourne is represented on the 40c stamp by Como House, which is a National Trust owned property, and is a gorgeous relic of a bygone era now surrounded by the bustling inner suburbs of the metropolis. We had a gorgeous 'high tea' there for my sister's hens a few years ago, an appropriately special place for a special occasion.

I don't really know anything about Buchanans in Townsville, or St. James Church in Sydney. What I do know is that these stamps are another example of the bold simplicity of 1970s Australian stamp design which really floats my boat.

When perusing my Stamps of Australia catalogue, which I purchased last week, I found that Australia has in fact celebrated architectural design in another set of stamps showcasing landmarks of Modern Australian Architecture in 2007.  That makes two architectural issues versus what I count as five horse-racing or horse-racing-related issues!

Image from Icograda

The sculptural form of the architecture is highlighted through the black and white photography featuring on the stamps. Like the block-cut prints of the 70s, this simplifies the elements of the buildings in order to really showcase the architecture. I like this 2007 set so much that I just bought it on ebay!

This is an entry for Viridian's Sunday Stamps. 

Collection management

I am still on a fairly marvellous high after a wonderful weekend of hiking along a section of the Great Ocean Walk with the lovely company of good friends. We walked along the coast and partly through the Otway Ranges National Park. I don't have a stamp showing the Otways, but delving through my Australian stamps collection I did find this suave little set of stamps featuring Port Campbell National Park - better known as the Twelve Apostles - which is at least in the neighbourhood and can represent my long weekend here.

On our leisurely drive back from the coast we decided to make a little stop off at the Geelong Mill Markets, a treasure-trove of vintage and retro wares that I had only ever heard of, but had never experienced for myself. A couple of hundred dollars and a couple of hours later, I departed the Mill Markets with a spring in my step and some great additions to my collection (and to my wardrobe).

I found stamps (of course) but I also found a couple of lovely old tins. The tins have provided me with a storage solution for my collection, which is getting a little out of hand lately.

Opening of Parliament Tin

Tally-Ho Tin. 

The thing I love about tins is that they are mini treasure chests, waiting to be opened; and inside the contents are asking to be leafed through, contemplated, shuffled, touched and sorted. It is a delight to poke through a tin of stamps.

I have stamps tucked away everywhere, in little envelopes in my bedside drawers; tucked into books; stored in my craft chest. They are all over the shop. Until now. Now, all my little bits and bobs, odds and ends, stamps and envelopes, can all be stored in my new tins. (This is the theory, anyway. The chaos of my bedroom probably indicates that the tins will become part of the chaos, rather than a solution to the chaos.)

My stamp albums still house most of my collection, but tins are useful for storing unsorted 'stuff'. See, at the moment I am having a slight dilemna - a quandary, if you will - over how to sort out my expanding collection. As I have mentioned in my previous posts, I have recently received first day covers from Pa Bert, two albums containing Grandma Nellie's collection, and a lovely collection of maps on stamps from a friend's Dad. What I am trying to work out, is do I keep all these collections separate and distinct, or do I absorb them into my own?

I do not know the answer, but I intend to spend time this Easter weekend joyfully sorting through my collection, rearranging pages in my stamp albums, and filing duplicate stamps into little tracing paper envelopes that can live in my new tins. What fun I will have!

A home for my collection

**Happy Easter everyone!**

Missives from a 14 year old

Post from Thailand: Totally beautiful combination of  map envelope and crab stamp

In writing this blog over the past few weeks, I have come to realise that I have always loved post - more so than I was particularly conscious of. In search of blogging inspiration this week, I ventured deep into the hazardous realm of my parents' backyard shed. I was looking for the aerogram that I remember once receiving from Grandma. I didn't find it - but I did find three shoe-boxes full of letters that I had packed away before going overseas in 1999 and have never thought of since. This tells us that as well as being a stamp collector and full time nerd, I am also a tragic hoarder.

Within the boxes of letters from my high school girlfriends (which I dared not read), there was a folder full of old pen pal letters. When I was fourteen I joined "International Penfriends" and as it turns out I have a whole bunch of letters from Japan, Thailand, Switzerland, Denmark and Indonesia dating from c.1995. I am pretty glad that I am a hoarder, because the letters are all quite beautiful.

Cool postmark on this Swiss envelope. And the stamp on the left is pretty gorgeous.

What is not beautiful, but quite funny, is that in my folder full of my old pen pal letters, I have kept drafts of some of my letters to my prospective pen pals. "Hi my name is Helen and I go to Mirboo North Secondary College" etc. Fairly tellingly, in my draft introductory letter I also wrote:

"My hobbies include netball and badminton. I like art, but I am not fantastic at it. And I collect lots of things. You name it, I collect it, basically. Stamps, soaps, business cards and GLO caps"

GLO Caps? What the hell are they? Well, actually I know what they are. Because along side the letters in the shoeboxes I found in the shed, there were also, you guessed it, GLO Caps. Sheesh. What a dork. I was onto something with the stamps though.

So my letters were pretty cheesy. What I think is particularly funny is the note to myself recording what I had included in  'Letter No. 2' to Damien Walsh, which I noted was written on apricot paper and sent on the 31.11.95. I told Damien:

•  all about an embarrassing moment at badminton (I wonder what that was?)
• that I have to share a bedroom with my little sister 
• and that I had an excursion for my geography class to the beach at Inverloch.

Pretty exciting stuff from the life of a 14 year old. Meanwhile, some fourteen-year-olds are drinking, partying and generally running amok. I was drafting pen pal letters.

Apparently I wasn't always so prompt with my replies...

So, in delving into my parents shed (a dangerous thing to do at the best of times) I did not find the aerogram that I was looking for, but I did find a whole collection of  'post'. And I also found that I told a lie in my first blog post, as I have actually received more than one aerogram in my life. I received one from a pen pal when I was fourteen. And here it is, 16 years later:

Featuring a hot air balloon! Love it.

Sunday Stamps: Spring/Flowers Autumn/Trees

This is my first time participating in Viridian's Sunday Stamps, and I hope that I will be forgiven for stretching the theme of flowers/springtime just a tad. I am, generally speaking, not really a floral sort of girl, and I live in the southern hemisphere. These are my excuses.  

Although Melbourne so regularly experiences four seasons in one day (just as Crowded House sang), Autumn is the official season, so that is the one I thought I would pay homage to here. Thus, in a happily Autumnal frame of mind, I have chosen some pretty gorgeous flowering tree stamps to share (so I am sort of on-theme, right?).

 

These stamps come courtesy of my Grandma Nellie. And also courtesy of my Grandma Nellie is her (slightly out of date) 1980 catalogue of Australian Stamps, which tells me that these tree stamps were released in June 1978.

I think these stamps are so exquisite, partly because of the beautiful matte colours used, and the strikingly simple designs; and partly because the trees illustrated are so distinctively Australian. I can't even pick a favourite stamp from this series!

I hope you have enjoyed these stamps as much as I have. Thanks for letting me participate in Sunday Stamps!

 

Maps and Stamps

Part of the reason that I am so open about my nerdy interest in stamps is that I work in an extremely nerdy office. I work for an archaeology consultancy based in Melbourne, and I have truly found my people there. At work, there is a girl with a sand collection, a girl with a rock collection and a boy and a girl who are both crazy about Lego. My boss collects vintage jigsaw puzzles with English country scenes on them. We are all complete nerds - there is no two ways about it.

But being around nerds is quite liberating, and I am in a place where I can vocalise my love of stamps without being laughed out of town. Well, almost. Ben, who is a rock art nerd, thought stamps were off the scale of nerdy. An 11 out of 10 on the geek-o-metre. Humpf.

It is also known around our office that I am particularly fond of maps. I like making maps, I like looking at maps, I like collecting maps (particularly Melways). Ben, the rock art nerd, was one day scoffing at my love of stamps, and remarked "Ha! Imagine if you had a stamp with a map on it! Your head would explode!"
Hell yeah, I thought. Maps on stamps would be TOTALLY COOL. What an awesome idea!

Luckily the lovely Kris was in the room to back me up when Ben was busy mocking stamps (and me). That night I went home and did a little big of googling and discovered that I was not alone, that there was a whole society dedicated to maps on stamps: the CartoPhilatelic Society! Who knew?!

The next day I very excitedly mentioned the CartoPhilatelic Society to Ben, who was not impressed; and to Kris, who may not have been impressed, but very kindly let me rabbit on about maps and stamps anyway. I did not think much more of this exchange and happily went off on a two week holiday to Samoa. But when I got back from holidays, waiting on my desk was a little packet. A little packet full of stamps, each one featuring a little map!

Kris had mentioned the maps on stamps thing to her Dad, a philatelist whom I have never met, and lo and behold, he had gone and put together a collection for me. How truly sweet! It made my day - actually, it made more than my day, as that was about six months ago, and I am still smiling when I think about it. Certainly having a little packet of stamps all with maps on them, sitting there, waiting for me on my return to work, made the transition from holiday-mode back into work-mode all the more bearable. Maps and Stamps. What a beautiful combination! Thank-you to Kris and her lovely Dad!

And that, friends, is the story of how I came to have a whole collection of stamps all with maps on them!

Make it Great in '88

The two albums Grandma gave me

I rediscovered stamps while writing my honours thesis in 2003. I was studying history, and chose to write my thesis on the Australian Bicentenary of 1988. More precisely - without going into too much boring detail - I was writing about ideas of nationhood and identity as they were expressed through the official art exhibitions that were staged, both here and abroad, during that year. And that was a year of my life right there, peeps: up to my neck in slogans such as, "Make it Great in '88" and "Celebration of a Nation".

Now, my thesis may have been less than groundbreaking, but the topic did allow me to look at lots of nice art in the process. And while I was busy thinking about ideas about how and why we commemorate certain events, I thought of my dusty stamp collection from when I was in primary school, and remembered that there had been all sorts of stamps issued in the lead up to the 200th anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove.

"May 1787: Departure"

There were quite a lot of stamps issued for the Bicentenary, but the ones I remembered were the ones illustrating a panoramic scene across five stamps, for different stages of the First Fleet's voyage. These stamps are not my  favourite - but they did turn me into a philatelist (of sorts).

But it is possible that I was always going to be a philatelist. That it was written in the stars. Last week I mentioned Pa Bert on my Dad's side of the family. Well, last weekend I visited my Mum's parents, and Grandma Nellie gave me her two stamp albums full of the stamps she had collected during the 60s, 70s and 80s. So stamp collecting, it seems, is in my blood from both sides of the family.

"June 1787: Teneriffe"

Grandma's albums are pretty great, and hold lots of treasures inside, which I am sure will be the focus of many a future post on this blog. And on the very last page of the second album of her stamps, I discovered Grandma had the mint set of Bicentennial stamps which kick-started my stamp collection. Yay!

The Bicentenary, marking 200 years of white settlement of Australia, was in many ways politically fraught. It marks a beginning, but it also marks an end. While the landing at Sydney Cove is an event at the foundation of the society that I live in (and am thus grateful for), it marked a tremendous, distressing, murderous, grievous upheaval for the indigenous peoples of this country. The violence of that history is not displayed in this picturesque set of stamps that commemorates the voyage, rather than the colonisation.

The story told in the stamps stops at the raising of the Union Jack. And to me that is interesting. What comes next is murky and hard to celebrate, so the story is chosen carefully. These stamps are every bit as much about 1988 as they are about 1788. Stamps as historic documents: I heart post.

Grandma's mint strip illustrating "January 1788: Arrival"

My used stamps - Aborigines watching the ships come in; The British hoisting the Union Jack