Category: Stamp collecting

The original FOMM travel articles

original-FOMM-travel-articles
Image: FOMM logo – author in the Greek islands, reflecting on life , 2004

Just thinking about how much we love to travel (re: last week’s mention of Japan), got me thinking about how much we are missing being able to scratch our itchy feet. We are not the only ones. When it comes to having family or close friends living overseas, not being able to visit is particularly hard. We all know someone who has not yet met their new grandchild (in London or New York). We appeased the travel bug in 2020 and 2021 by taking month-long caravan treks in the outback, but it is not the same as travelling overseas.

An old family friend in New Zealand is having a few health problems and at 89, this much-travelled woman’s days of dropping in on friends around the world unannounced is probably over. It would have been good to just hop on a plane and turn up at the hospital. In her travelling days she was wont to describe her spontaneous arrivals as, ‘It’s just me, turning up like a bad penny.’ But we did send flowers.

Our friend went ‘backpacking’ in the 1950s with an intrepid Kiwi friend. They were both teachers and had a hunger to work their way around the world. Very few young women travelled alone in 1954, let me tell you. At the time my parents met them in Scotland (autumn 1954), they were out every day in the back blocks of Montrose, picking potatoes, saving up for their next travel adventure. Dad read a story about them in the local newspaper, tracked them down and invited them to stay for the weekend. He’d been thinking about emigrating for some time and had noted they came from the district where he had been offered a job. They became firm friends and of course that was the genesis of our emigrating to New Zealand in 1955.

Our old friend used to send me stamps she’d collected in her travels (the US, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden Switzerland, Sarawak, the Solomon Islands, to name a few). The album is still in the bookcase here. It’s not worth much money but it brings back treasured memories. Once I reached my 20s, I felt compelled to leave NZ on what was then known as the “OE” (overseas experience). But you were supposed to go to London, go drinking with other Kiwi and Aussies in Earl’s Court and head home once your money was spent.

It didn’t always turn out like that. Young Kiwis or Aussies travelled, met their true love and settled in foreign climes. Serious travellers worked out the only way to keep travelling was to learn a bit of the local lingo and wangle a job. In France I picked grapes (the Vendange). After 10 days of dawn to dusk picking, I could barely get out of bed.

Later I landed two part-time jobs in Edinburgh, where I lived for six months in a bed-sit. The three-hour shift cleaning a department store before it opened was easy work and we got a free cooked breakfast. The evening shift cleaning offices went from 5pm to 8pm. Those two gigs helped pay my rent and grocery bills and at weekends we’d go adventuring in the highlands or south to the Lakes District.

I recently discovered a folder of travel articles from 2004, when we swapped houses with an English couple and spent six months living in a village in Surrey. Work wasn’t going so well, so I took all the long service leave and holidays that were owing and absented myself for six months.

It’s intriguing now to look back on these rambling emails to folks back home as the forerunner to Friday on My Mind. My then-colleague Jeffrey Sommerfeld had developed a weekly email to hundreds of our contacts (he was so pre-Twitter). He tells me now that so many of my contacts asked after me (in a kindly way), that he forwarded our unedited and sometimes rambling accounts to family and friends. They loved being kept in the loop about the adventures of Bob and ‘Mrs W’.

Here’s a nostalgic taste of how travel was before Covid and 9/11. I’ll follow up next week with our experiences of Hydra, a Greek Island best-known for once being home to poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.

March 2004: TRAVEL can test the strongest relationship – just ask me. On second thoughts, don’t ask me because I don’t know my left from my right and can’t read a map.

My last bout of travelling in the 1970s was a solo effort, one last fling with tepid youth, if you will. I was practising to be a writer so did not really care where my feckless, directionless kind of travel took me.

In 2004 Mrs W and I made a base in Surrey for six months and made periodic forays to “the continent” as the Poms say.

I persuaded Mrs W to start with three weeks in Greece, nurturing warm memories of that stark country and its beautiful islands as a friendly and laid-back travel experience.

We flew via Singapore, arriving in Athens at 6am in that slightly stunned and disoriented state that flying in a pressurised container for 12 hours can induce.

The first stage of our adventure went without a hitch, lugging our (considerable) baggage on to the airport bus, arriving in central Athens about 8.30am.

I identified the Metro sign across the road and off we went. Much of Athens was a building site at the time, as the city prepared for the Olympics.

The escalators were out of order that day so we lugged four bags and a guitar down four flights of steep stairs to the (new) Athens metro station at Constitution Square.

On arriving at the right stop (Monistraki), I discovered there were five exits and I had no idea which one would take us to our hotel!

So there we were, us and our baggage, on a busy, dusty street, trying to decipher the tiny print on my (photocopied) local map. Mrs W was by now unimpressed with my forward planning. She was also discovering that my claims of knowing the language (after seven days on a Greek cruise ship in 1973), as complete bollocks.

Did I say we were in this situation largely because we had pledged to use local public transport and eschew taxis unless absolutely necessary? I used my mobile to call Hotel Tempi which I had pre-booked for three nights. Friendly host Yannes said we were just two streets away from the hotel “is easy – Parakalo.” but we turned right instead of left and took a very circuitous route via the fish market, across a road jammed with trucks, cars and two or three hundred motorcycles, carrying and dragging the baggage we needed en route to six months in the UK (which we did not get to until April).

Fortunately, our host encounters grumpy, jet-lagged tourists each and every day so was able to calm us down and send us to our room with the promise “I bring bags later”.

The hotel stored our bags (“no charge, is easy”) while we toured around southern Greece, starting with three days on Hydra.

In three weeks of exploring Greece on public transport and on foot we got lost many times: the big question for couples travelling on a budget to ask themselves is – does it really matter? As the Greeks would say “chalárose kai apólafse” (relax and enjoy).

Next week: A donkey ride on Hydra

 

Stamp of approval a one-horse race

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Australia Post celebrates Winx’s record-breaking 26th consecutive win with a commemorative stamp

You’d have to say Australia Post had a bit riding on the champion mare Winx winning her 26th consecutive race at Warwick Farm last Saturday. Let’s say at the outset that this is about stamp collecting, not horse racing (surveys show the latter subject turns FOMM readers off – or politics – that was a three horse race…Ed.)

Whether you like horse racing or not, the existence of Winx the super horse must have filtered through, as it is many a moon since any horse won this many races on the trot, which is racing parlance for an unbroken winning streak.

Celebrating the mare’s place in equine history, Australia Post released a commemorative stamp, pictured here by courtesy of AP and ‘with perforations’ as requested. Journalists received the press release from Australia Post about a minute after the race was run and won.

“We plan ahead for important activities, achievements, and national events in the calendar, and had extra resources on standby to assist in producing the special stamps,” an Australia Post spokesperson said, in response to our obvious question.

So all ended well. If you are a stamp collector or philatelist as it is known in the trade, you will already have ordered your first day covers, special 26-stamp packs, a set of maxi cards and a medallion cover.

Horse stamps are not that unusual – examples include Black Caviar in 2013 and a set of four stamps issued in 1978. They featured Phar Lap, Bernborough, Peter Pan and Tulloch. The collection is notable for fine art work by Brisbane artist Brian Clinton.

Like Dusty Springfield, I was wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ that either Malcom Turnbull or his nemesis were philatelists so I could make this politically relevant. But it seems only one (former) Federal politician, Philip Ruddock, collects stamps. This seemingly innocuous hobby at times embroiled the then Immigration Minister in controversy.

Ruddock, now Mayor of Hornsby Shire, was a member of Amnesty International. Critics found his membership of the organisation was at odds with his government’s hard-line immigration policies. In 2000, Amnesty asked Mr Ruddock not to wear his lapel badge when performing ministerial duties and not to refer to his membership when promoting policies opposed by Amnesty. AM 18/3/2000

In a profile for The Good Weekend in 2002, writer Richard Guilliatt was given a look at Ruddock’s collection, which spans three generations. Guilliatt, perhaps innocently, suggested that the high dramas of the job had spurred the stamp collecting hobby on.

“…every month letters pour into Ruddock’s Parliament House office in Canberra, imploring him to liberate the men, women and children detained behind razor wire in Australia’s desert camps for Third World asylum seekers,” he wrote. “Those letters come affixed with all manner of exotic stamps, which Ruddock gets his secretary to tear off so he can take them home to his house in the leafy northern hills of Sydney, to be packed away for sorting.

“That’s one of the good things about getting a lot of letters from Amnesty International,” Ruddock told Guilliatt.

If few politicians collect stamps, at least a dozen former Prime Ministers featured on Australian stamps in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s important to note that all received the honour after their deaths.

“Until the introduction of the Australia Post Australian Legends Awards in 1997, the only living person allowed on a stamp was the reigning monarch”, the spokeperson told FOMM.

Nevertheless, the PM’s head on a postage stamp seems clearly out of fashion now, in this era when one is never quite sure if the PM will last his or her term. But there have been enough sporting celebrities, athletes, actors, singers, writers and decorated soldiers to compensate.

In an aside for crime fiction aficionadas, the most infamous stamp collector award must surely go to Lawrence Block’s fictional hit man, Keller. John Keller is the protagonist in Block’s crime series which began with Hit Man in 1998. Keller collects pre-1940 stamps and uses down-time between ‘jobs’ to visit stamp shops and exhibitions. It’s a kind of cover for his apparent lack of legitimate income, not unlike Block’s gentleman burglar and antique bookstore owner, Bernie Rhodenbarr.

Many famous people are listed in various publications and websites as stamp collectors. The collection does not have to be distinguished to command a price. Former Beatle John Lennon’s collection of 550 stamps from his childhood was bought by the Smithsonian Institute’s National Postal Museum in 2005 for about $A74, 000.

Which brings me to the best-selling commemorative stamp of all time – the Elvis stamp released in 1993, Perhaps the delay since the rock singer’s death in 1977 was due to persistent ‘sightings’ of the late Mr Presley. Even today you will find folk who will tell you he is still alive and living under an alias, like someone in witness protection. Elvis would be 83 if still alive today.

The US Postal Service printed 500 million commemorative stamps – three times the usual print run. It was the most highly publicised stamp issue in the USPS history. The people were asked to choose between two designs (1.2 million votes), the majority preferring the stylised image of the young rocker, microphone in hand.

Stamps can be highly controversial items. For instance, the first secular Christmas stamp in the US, with its pair of white candles and a wreath with a red bow, was released in 1962.

Critics said it crossed the line between church and state. The public was also unenthused about a 1963 design – an illuminated Christmas tree in front of the White House.

Public takes dim view of Surfing Santa

The most controversial Australian stamp was also a Christmas release.  The 1977 stamp featured a humorous depiction by Adelaide artist Roger Roberts of Santa Claus riding a surfboard. Some members of the public were affronted, saying the postal service was not taking Christmas seriously. Until 1975, all Christmas stamps featured religious themes, often based on the traditional nativity story. There was no such fuss about the mix of secular and Christian stamps released in 1976.

If you thought the popularity of email would adversely affect stamp collecting, the market is as robust and profitable as ever. As an extreme example, the One-Cent Magenta from British Guiana, issued in 1856 and thought to be unique, sold at a New York auction in 2014 for a record $9.5 million.

In 2007, the Australian collection of Arthur Gray was sold through Shreves auction house in New York for more than $7 million. Among the spectacular results was the $265,000 paid for a block of four 1919 £1 brown and blue Kangaroos.

So did you collect stamps as a child? Did you, as I discovered, learn at some point in your cash-strapped adulthood that the collection was worthless?

We had a family friend who spent most of her younger years travelling to exotic climes and would write, with bundles of stamps included ‘for wee Bobby’.

I gave away stamp collecting and its fussy handling (gloves and tweezers and corners to mount the stamps rather than pasting them in the album), around about the time I realised girls were interesting.

I still have those two old albums tucked away somewhere – among Father’s Letters, I’m thinking.

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