stamps

a recent comment by Sedgwick re stamps:
On t'other hand responses in comments boxes don't come with brightly coloured stamps from exotic locations. Belgian Congo, Helvetia and French Equatorial Africa, countries that put 1950's Australia way down on the Richter scale of philatelic design. Did the 50 quetzal toucan stamp move for you too? Did it for me.

well may I remember Helvetia but not the quetzel. There was a surplus of this Australian stamp in my album and tin, which both fascinated and repelled with its strange tone and scale. Giant Kangaroo Paws are threatening Perth.
My father tried to pass on an interest in stamps to his children, but we merely dabbled. But because I dabbled as a child, the set of stamps that I displayed and played with are fixed with that child's eye magnifier so that when I come across a page like this they suddenly all come back to me as old friends. Skyblue Winston Churchill, Douglas Mawson looking like a dispossessed knight with a chain mail balaclava, crimson flightless birds and pair-bonded flying machines. I think the stamps are safely cellared somewhere, but this brief glimpse has made me want to retrieve them.
Meanwhile there are some nice stamps that are more current than these that the current crop of Brownies might be collecting as we speak.

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Comments: stamps

I've still got my stamp album.

The 'sticky' on the stamp hinges has long left on an extended astral travel to worlds yet to be discovered, even created. A reminiscing look through the collection requires archival quality cotton gloves, dimmed lighting and an industrial strength dust mask. The Sedgwick Dead Sea Scrolls Stamp Collection. (No flash photography, please.)

My pommie grandfather (top notch surgical bootmaker, loopy spiritualist and avid philatelist) used to send me parcels bulging with stamps each month ... along with copious copperplate hand written notes. "Keep this one, don't swap. Could be valuable one day." "Odd though it might seem, the postmarked one is more valuable than the mint version." "Here are some more with that bastard Hitler's ugly bonce on it. Back in '45 the rotten little bugger tried to doodlebug 8 Bell Lane Cottages six doors down." "Don't mix up your Sun Yat Sens with your Chiang Kai Cheks."

It was all beaut and exotic, but I never did let on too him that I much preferred the "Beano" and "Dandy" comics my Nana slipped into the parcels.

And yes, I do still have some of them too.

And yes, oddly enough I barrack for the Magpies.


Posted by Sedgwick at December 8, 2003 01:43 PM

"Giant Kangaroo Paws are threatening Perth."

and all these years I've thought they were the dreaded Triffids. Phew!
Posted by Sedgwick at December 8, 2003 01:49 PM

A rare one from my collection.

http://www.geocities.com/feralclothing2/snugcud.txt
Posted by Sedgwick at December 8, 2003 02:00 PM

Yes I lacked the motor skills neccessary for correct archival practice and the stamps would often come unstuck slip sliding away.
The slip in folders were better in this regard, but I think I may have desecrated them with mispelt biro-d headings like Helevitica...

Your grandfather's note are so wonderful. "keep this one, don't swap"... a wealth of subtext in the copperplate, of astral relationships.

yes I like your stamp, and good to see some political content gracing the pages of boynton. Apparently I need it.

and sorry , but there's only one true football team, again inherited from my father, and that shall be known as South Melbourne.
Posted by boynton at December 8, 2003 02:13 PM