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Peru 1952, It might be better to show buildings rather than students to represent education in Peru

Peru is the home of the oldest continuing operating university in the Americas that dates from 1653. It has impressive and historic facilities. This stamp shows us a new in 1945 engineering school housed in a large and impressive art deco building. In 2011, Peru opened a new engineering school housed in ultra modern buildings that won the  Pritzger prize for architecture. With such a great commitment to education, you might expect Peru to be at the head of the pack. Or not? So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

This stamp issue is right up my alley showing off new construction of the time in Peru. The printing was farmed out to De La Rue in London. Here the ball seems to dropped as the design is lackluster. Perhaps the London printers with access to photos decided to hint that the buildings really were not that great. It also could be that Peru only paid for the economy printing package.

Todays stamp is issue A122, a 25 Centavo stamp issued by Peru in 1952. It was a 10 stamp issue in various denominations. There were later versions for airmail and third world currency devaluation. Interestingly late versions were printed by Joh Enschede in the Netherlands so perhaps Peru was dissatisfied with De La Rue’s work, or were offered an even more economic printing package. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

The first University as most early ones in Peru was founded in order to train Priests to serve in spread out religious missions. For this, there was much instruction in indigenous languages. My research lead me to the list of the 130 top schools in Peru, and these older institutions are at the top of the list.

The first Peru University

This stamp though has us look to engineering education. Here the picture is less in focus. There were three engineering schools that made the list that were founded in 1997, 2002, and 2011. What about this one dating from 1945? Everyone can’t make the best list, even a very long list, in Peru.

Lima’s new engineering university. No stamp for this building yet

In 2012 Peruvian 15 year olds participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment along with 65 other countries. Peru’s students came in last in reading, math, and science. All three subjects tested. Peru blamed the performance on the particularly low scores of indigenous students that face language issues and often have to work when they should be in school. Peru does however graduate a lot of students and literacy is over 90 %.

Peru since 2009 has been a participant in the international program One Laptop Per Child program that has given out over a million laptops in Peru that have a built in assistant named Butia’. Like building fancy buildings, handing out cheap fake laptops to desperately poor people did not have the desired effect on learning outcomes. The OLPC scam shut down in 2014.

The one laptop per child “laptop”. I am glad I don’t have try to write these articles on that.

Well my drink is empty. If you can and desire to read some more, there will be a new story to be learned from stamp collecting tomorrow.

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Japan 1946, Still wearing a Noh mask during Operation Blacklist

Sometimes it is surprising what continues in a troubled time. Japan, for the first time in it’s history was occupied by a foreign military. There was a great shortage of food, much damage, many returning from overseas, and an old establishment trying to retain it’s position. There were however versions of this stamp issue to commemorate stamp collecting shows. There were also performances of Noh plays, that dated from the 14th century. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The image on this stamp is not the image of a baby but a mask used by an actor during a Noh play. Through the use of a mask, a then all male actor could portray old or young, male or female. Through tilting his head, the actor is able to convey an emotion  through the mask. The mask is painted egg shells over a base of cypress wood

Todays stamp is issue A172, a 50 yen stamp issued by Japan when it was under post war occupation. This was a thirteen stamp issue in different denominations. Most were issued without gum on the back. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $2 used.

Noh plays began in the 14th century. They are musical plays on serious subjects performed in succession often  with comedic interludes in between. The plays were often based off Japanese literature. Usually a supernatural takes on a human form  to face a challenge on earth. There is another actor playing an antagonist.

The performance of Noh plays became much less common in the 19th century as Japan industrialized and westernized. Then a strange thing happened. There was a movement among the children  of Japan’s newly well off to study the old techniques. As many of the children taking the classes were girls, the acting, chorus and band roles began to open to them,  it would be a while yet before women would be allowed in professional adult performances. The professional adult performances now continue with major government subsidies as Noh is recognized as an important part of Japanese heritage.

A Noh performance with musicians behind.

Japan was in a fairly desperate state when this stamp was issued. Japan during the war had kept themselves fed by bringing in food from the occupied territories. During the American occupation called Operation Blacklist this was replaced by American food aid paid for by loans to Japan. The many occupation troops also brought with them their own food so not to further tax the Japanese shortage. America launched a series of reforms modeled on the American new deal. Fighting this was the well off under the old system. Where it worked best was in agriculture, where about 40 % of the farmland was bought from the rich and given at token prices to the peasants. In industry, America wanted to break apart the system  of business alliances that choked competition. There was little luck with this though the alliances took a new name called keretzu that indicated they were less formal.

Tokyo 1946

The occupation faded between 1949 and 1952 and the large occupation force mostly left to fight in Korea. On the last official day of it in 1952, a large Japanese newspaper complained that the occupation left the people of Japan listless, irresponsible, and obsequious. Perhaps I could suggest they should see an old play or take up stamp collecting?

Well my drink is empty and nobody is seeing public plays right now. Many indeed are feeling listless, irresponsible, and obsequious. I have a suggestion for them. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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Togo 1978, Getting rid of small pox around the world

Voltaire wrote that in his time, 80 percent of people got small pox and 20 percent died of it. Edward Jenner thought something could be done about it and the World Health Organization decided how to get the result out worldwide. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

This stamp is from the year the world experienced it’s last large outbreak of small pox in Somalia. The stamp sort of implies that the way it was eradicated was to line up everyone to get a shot, the way it was done in the UK and the USA. This was not thought possible for the third world so the WHO adopted a strategy of keeping a close eye out for outbreaks and then vaccinate heavily locally.

Todays stamp is issue C335, a 60 Franc airmail stamp issued by Togo on January 9th, 1978. It was a two airmail stamp issue in different denominations that was also available as a souvenir sheet. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents cancelled to order.

So what to do about the very deadly small pox. It was noticed that milkmaids were not getting the virus. It was postulated that having been exposed to the similar but much less deadly cow pox they had developed an immunity. In 1796, English physician and scientist Edward Jenner scraped the puss off of blisters on the hand of milkmaid Sarah. She had caught cow pox from a cow named Blossom. He then injected the puss in two shots, one in each arm into the eight year old son of his gardener named Albert. Albert got a bad fever later that day but recovered with no signs of the disease. Albert was then repeatedly directly injected with small pox but did not come down with the disease. Jenner made a report on his findings to the Royal Academy but they decided to hold off publication until he repeated with similar success 23 more times including his toddler son. The hide of Blossom now hangs on the wall of Saint George Medical School library and it is generally agreed that Edward Jenner saved more human lives than anyone on earth.

Blossom’s utter cowpox blisters and similar ones from Sarah’s arms

The vaccination program spread rapidly in the third world starting in 1968. The last outbreak in the western hemisphere was in Brazil in 1971. The last outbreak in east Asia was in Indonesia in 1972. The last one in India was Bangladesh in 1975 and the last in Africa was in 1978 in Somalia. These were all places that had previously many cases. In 1980, small pox was declared eradicated worldwide. There are still tiny stocks of the virus in a few of the worlds research labs and the last world death from small pox  was a scientist studying it.

WHO poster

Well my drink is empty. As we brace ourselves to get the shot of the Covid vaccine, think of poor Albert having to take shot after shot of the actual virus to prove the vaccine worked. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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Poland 1979. How should an atheist government handle the visit of the new Polish Pope

In this period stamp issue, we can get a great sense of how the government decided to play the 1979 visit of John Paul II. If you can put yourself into their position, I think they did a pretty good job. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe. take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

As a frequent stamp issuer, tied in to the collector market, Poland could not have let such an important event go by without an issue. The stamps that came out were oversized, included a souvenir sheet. The presentation was respectful to the man, but treated him as a man. At least it was not done as a foolish man wearing funny clothes spouting old superstitions.

Todays stamp is issue A723, an 8.4 Zloty stamp issued by Polans on June 2nd, 1979, the first day of Pope John Paul II’s eight day visit. With lead times this meant the stamp designers had to imagine what his trip would look like. Interestingly the period American news articles I read made no mention of the Pope visiting an Auschwitz Memorial as shown on the stamp, though I have no doubt he did. Both of the stories were in Jewish owned papers, so it was interesting omission. This was a two stamp and  souvinir sheet issue in different denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents, cancelled to order.

The officially atheist communist regime had been in power for thirty three years in 1979. Pope John Paul had grown up in Poland experiencing the early pre war state, the wartime occupations and the early years of the then current regime. He had then spent many years based in Rome. What the Polish regime was very worried about after his rise in 1978 was that he would become a troublesome figure promoting disloyally and even insurrection toward the stagnant state.

The regime pointed to the then recent example of Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious Iranian leader who preached insurrection for years from a Paris exile. His return to Iran in 1979 was leading the successful revolution.

These type thoughts have a great deal to do with the image on the stamp. It portrays what happened at Auschwitz as a moral failure not just of the  occupying perpetrators but as a moral failing of the local Catholic religious in not preventing it. This makes sense if you remember that the Polish communist regime was very heavily under the influence of secular Jews. They understood that the vast majority Catholic country needed to become more secular to be more compatible with the regime imposed on them and a major moral failing of Catholics was a good thing to remind, over and over.

Communist Leader Henryk Jablonski and the Pope

A Pope is used to playing nice with a regime with which it has major disagreements He was received and appeared with communist leaders who in tern tied their respect for the Church to the respect they held for all their countrymen including believers. The Pope did get in a few mild jabs that man was not just a means of production and when venerating war losses, he mentioned Poland being abandoned by their Soviet ally when Warsaw rose up against the Nazis. This culminated at the Polish Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where a Polish military band tried to play a military march while the crowd was moved to sing Ava Maria.

The Pope and the huge crowd he attracted

Well my drink is empty and I will get to pour two more to toast Pope John Paul II for how he handled himself and the communist regime for taking the chance and letting the visit happen. Come again on Monday for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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Vietnam 1984, Enjoying the Yunnan lar gibbon, for a little while longer

There is a risk doing an endangered species stamp issue. Even near valueless stamps like this one last and so later generations can measure how important maintaining species, even cute ones, was to Vietnam. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

Vietnam is not going to come across very well in this article. That does not mean this is an unattractive stamp. Even here though there is Vietnamese shirking. During the 1980s, Vietnam outsourced their stamp printing to Cuba, so it is perhaps them to whom we should thank. In an earlier period of chaos, stamp printing quality declined to the point they couldn’t perforate the stamps. Since those became more valuable, Vietnam dutifully offered the collector imperforate versions of later stamps, even for this issue having Cuba print some imperforates.

Todays stamp is issue A392, a one Dong stamp issued by Vietnam on February 26th,1984. It was a seven stamp issue in various denominations. The Scott catalog only values this issue as a set, but if you divide by seven you get a value of 14 cents cancelled to order. The current value of 1 Dong is 4.3 one/thousands of an American penny. This stamp imperferate rises in value to $1.70. That is over 39,000 Dongs.

The animal on this stamp is the Yunnan lar gibbon. Lar gibbons are all endangered but still exist in zoos and in small numbers in the wild in the Malay peninsula and northern Borneo. Vietnam no longer is home to any as theirs were the Chinese Yunnan variety. It was thought that a game preserve in Yunnan Province, China held the last of these. However there was a survey done of the park in 2007 and none were found and the sub species was declared extinct. The gibbons were not hunted much for food but their habitats were wrecked by logging and it was common to kill a gibbon mother so that the litter  could be sold as pets.

Not Vietnamese baby lar gibbon

What to do when a country is so worthless as to let this stuff happen? Well in Vietnam’s case, they now accept much foreign aid from their old rival the USA. Among the myriad of aid programs is the USAID Saving Species Project. They encourage enforcement of wildlife protections and put out public relations materials trying to discourage local human consumption of illegal wildlife. American aid to Vietnam was over 200 million dollars in 2020. I would wear out the zero button on my computer if I converted that to Dongs. The aid program currently targets endangered pangolins, elephants, and rhinos. May I suggest a new Cuban/Vietnamese stamp issue, imperforate for old times sake, of these animals, so future generations can determine if the American aid was well spent?

USAID celebrates a new phone ap for quicker payments for habitat preservation. I am not kidding!

Well my drink is empty. Come again tomorrow for a hopefully more upbeat story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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Canada 1997, Remembering Formula One driver Gilles Villeneuve the year his son was Formula One Champion

When you think of Formula One Racing, Canada is not the first country you think of. You might have though in 1997 with French Canadian  Jacques Villeneuve the driver champion of the season. What a great time to remind Canada had some in the family history with Formula One. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The stamp shows a Gilles driven Ferrari 312 T4 receiving  the checkered flag during his best ever season in 1979. He won 3 Formula One races that year, two in America and one in South Africa.

Todays stamp is issue A671, a 45 cent stamp issued by Canada on June 12th, 1997. This was a two stamp issue in different denominations that came before son Jacques’ later year championship. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

Gilles was born in 1950 in Quebec, the son of a piano tuner. During his attempts to break into Formula One he would subtract two years from his age to more appear the young up and comer. In his teen years he raced locally in his personally owned 1967 Ford Mustang. He was also a notable and more lucrative snowmobile racer. Money was tight but he was able to get into open wheel racing in a personally owned Formula Ford racer that put him in competition with some better known drivers.

He received an invitation in 1977 to join the McLaren Formula One team. He only ran two races with lackluster finishes and was let go when he asked for a pay raise for the next season. This freed him up though to accept a position personally from Enzo Ferrari to drive for the factory Ferrari Formula One team. He was a controversial choice but the team had just lost more famous Nikki Lauda.

The first 1978 season with Ferrari did not go well. This was not all Gilles fault. The cars were having trouble with a new variation of their Michelin tires and the Lotus team that year added ground affects to their cars for the first time making them more stable then the Ferraris. Things got even worse at the last race of the season at the Japanese Grand Prix when he bumped another car went airborne and landed on a group of spectators, killing one. He was not penalized as the spectators where not where they were supposed to be.

1979 was where things came together for Giles. Ferrari had copied the Lotus ground effects and it was the last year they ran their reliable 515 horsepower, 3 liter normally aspirated flat 12  cylinder engine. The car won 6 races that year, three with Gilles at the wheel. He came in second in the driver point championship.

!980 saw a new chassis and a new smaller turbocharged V6 engine. The team did not have as much success as the cars had handling problems. At the 1982 during a practice lap for the Belgian Grand Prix, Gilles again ran into a car ahead of him and went airborne. As it was a practice lap. he was not wearing a helmet and died of a broken neck after a bad landing. Giles’ son  Jacques has had a long career currently in some European version of NASCAR and lives in European tax havens.

Well my drink is empty. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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Karki (Halki) Island 1912, Flying the Italian flag in the Aegean, strange isn’t it

A chain of islands called the Dodecanese fell to the Italians in the Italy-Turkey war of 1912. The question was what to do with them? So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

These stamps are a little bit of a disappointment being bulk mail issues with just an overprint. One nice thing was that they list the islands individually, the islands only foray to date in stamps. The Italians managed to stay a bizarrely long 36 years, too bad they never got around to proper empire issues with the King’s portrait in the corner and the window into their exotic colony.

Todays stamp is issue A43, a two cent stamp issued by the then Italian Military Occupation of Karki Island in 1912. It was a ten stamp issue in different denominations. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth $7.25 unused. A double overstamp ups the value to $360.

The Dodecanese Islands, the largest Rhodes, sit very close off of Asia Minor but most of the people on the islands are Greek. At first the Italians just had a military occupation that did not bother much with civilians. There were even a Treaty of Ouchey agreeing to give them back to the Turks that was never enacted and later a Treaty of Sevres agreeing to hand them over to Greece. Neither was enacted as you don’t give things to war losers.

Things changed in the 1920s with Italy still in procession and a fascist government keen on Empire building. Cesare Marie De  Vecchi was appointed Viceroy and set out a program of Italianization. Schools began to teach in Italian. Italian settlers were invited in to farm previously unused land and as employees of the Italian military. Once there, they were encouraged to marry Greek girls. One obstacle was that the Greeks were Orthadox and the Italians Catholic. De Vecchi tried to finesse this by starting a separate Italian controlled denomination of the Orthadox Church for the Dodecanese.  Promising students from the islands were given scholarships to the University of Pisa in Italy.

To some extent this stuff worked as year after year went by and the Italians were still there. De Vecchi was promoted to something called the Grand Council of Fascism back in Rome. When the weather changed that was something that was no resume builder. Oddly he was first sentenced to death in absentia by the German backed Italian Social Republic for not doing enough to keep Mussolini in power. De Vecchi escaped to Argentina on a fake Paraguay passport. He was able to return to Italy in his last years though he was still a vocal fascist.

Cesare Maria De Vecchi

In 1943 the British hoped to take advantage of the chaos in Italy to take the Dodecanes. Lord George Jellicoe was parachuted onto Rhodes to try to convince the large Italian military presence to change sides. They hoped for airbases that could be used to bomb Axis targets in the Balkans from a shorter range. While he was there the Germans landed with full force. The Italians didn’t fight the Germans but about 75 percent demilitarized. Like De Vecchi, Jellicoe used the chaos to escape, though he didn’t need a Paraguay passport.  He was later the Leader of the House of Lords. The formal handover of the islands from Italy to Greece happened in 1948. A casino built by the Italians has proved quite popular.

Lord Jellicoe

The Greeks have not proven to be that great for Karki Island which they now call Halki. In the 1950s there was a mass migration of Greeks off the island setting up a Greek community in Tarpon Springs, Florida in the USA. The island is down to about 300 people.

Well my drink is empty. I will pour another to toast having a place to run to. Come again on Monday when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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Ecuador 1920, Luis Vivero, perhaps he served on the patriotic junta of Guayaquil?

So what to do to celebrate an eventually successful uprising against Spain 100 years before. Show the leaders, it wasn’t just a junta, it was a patriotic junta. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

We are lucky that Ecuador was nice enough to put this fellows name on the stamp. The issue marked 100 years since the uprising by a group of military men in Guayaquil. 200 years on the internet seems to have no record of him except as a street name in Quito. The problem is there was a different patriotic junta in Quito 8 years before that had their backsides handed to them by Spanish Loyalists. Well that is kind of what happened to the Guayaquil people as well. What can you do when your country’s cupboard is bare?

Todays stamp is issue A86, a four Centavo stamp issued by Ecuador in 1920. It was a twenty stamp issue in various denominations with lots of later overprints and surcharges in the shithole country style. In a few weeks Trump will leave office and we will have to revert to not calling a shithole a shithole, so lets enjoy it while we still can. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

In the Spanish colonial days the most important and richest city was Lima in Peru. As a result, the people there fought the hardest to stay Spanish. The further you got away from Lima you got the more poverty and the more luck revolutionary generals like Columbian Simon Bolivar and Argentine San Martin had.

That doesn’t mean that locals didn’t rise up in neighboring Ecuador and try to establish themselves as independence leaders. The patriotic junta of 1812 in Quito tried to send an army into Peru and was soundly defeated. In 1820, the patriotic junta in Guayaquil  immediately appealed for help from General Simon Bolivar. Bolivar responded by sending a small army that was again defeated by Peruvian Spanish Loyalists.

What to do, Lima was becoming quite the thorn in the side of the revolutionaries. General San Martin sailed up from Argentina/Chile and laid siege to Lima. Ashore he was able to send a fresh force to turn the tide against the Loyalists in Ecuador. Now it was time to divide the spoils or is it spoiled.

In 1822 there was a conference in Guayaquil where Jose de San Martin and Simon Bolivar met. Afterward there was a formal ball, perhaps even the good Senor Vivero was allowed to attend. Bolivar toasted the two most important people in South America, General San Martin and  um myself. San Martin took the hint and quickly left Peru and quite soon retired to France. He wasn’t one of the two most important men there and maybe that was for the best.

An imagination of the Guayaquil Conference. Those fellows in the background, will Mr. Vivero please raise his hand and be recognized.

Well my drink is empty. I write these articles a few weeks ahead of when they publish and it just came to me that Biden will have assumed office when this publishes. Naturally I withdraw my dubious charge that Ecuador was a shithole. Any holes in the ground there are at least potential gold mines. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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North Yemen 1967, In a time of desperation, why not look for inspiration from a Flemish Master and his new fertile wife

I while back I did a pathetic and fake but militaristic stamp from the other side in the then North Yemen Civil War, see https://the-philatelist.com/2019/06/20/fake-north-yemen-stamp-remembers-the-barefoot-bazooka-guy-freedom-fighter/   . The Republican side in 1967 had just lost their Egyptian benefactor and so had their offsite printing presses crank up myriad stamps on art subjects that they hoped would attract the worldwide stamp market. They have attracted me, though so many years later it is of no help. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

Think back to 1967 and the frequent simple single color printing of many European and American stamps. Now check out the quality of the Rubens image transfer and the grand gold foil used to frame it. To then notice the Yemen Arab Republic name and Arab script is to make one think the stamp is fake, but it is not.

Todays stamp is issue A60, a 1/2 Bogaches stamp by the Yemen Arab Rebublic then holding the capital Sana in North Yemen. Yemen no longer calls its cents Bogaches so half of one Bogaches would be 1.25 Fils in the current Yemen currency. That comes out to 5 one thousands of an American penny. This was a five stamp issue on Flemish painting Masters that also came as a souvinir sheet and as a set of imperferates with the frames the paintings in silver instead of gold foil. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents, which is disappointing until you think of that value in terms of Yemeni Rials.

Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577 in modern Germany where his Belgian parents had run for the crime of being Calvinists. They then had Peter Paul Baptized Catholic in Cologne to allow for their return to the then Spanish Hapsburg run low countries. After an elaborate training that included time in Italy he began painting based out of Antwerp in the Flemish Baroque style at the behest of foreign benefactors and often on Catholic religious subjects. One of his frequent commissioners was Marie de Medici the Queen Mother of France. The frequent trips to Paris saw Rubens act as a spy and diplomat for his families native Duchy of Brabant, in modern Belgium.

Rubens self portrait

At age 53, four years after the death of his first wife, Rubens married her 15 year old niece Helena Fourment with whom he had three more children that was the subject of the painting on this stamp. Rubens style changed with his new model and became very popular. His voluptuous nudes were cast in the Spanish Hapsburg Royal Courts as the Roman God Venus. Rubens got very rich off his paintings and was able to buy a country estate outside of Antwerp. In his last years his style changed again to the drawing of landscapes.

Around 1784, the painting on the stamp was acquired by a French citizen named Louis Capet. You  may know him better as King Louis XVI. he was forced to use the above name during his last days before facing the guillotine. The painting was moved to the Louvre where it still hangs.

Around 1969, North Yemen papered over their differences under a unity government that included Republicans and Monarchists. Bizarrely the new leader was a closeted Jew. Sounds like a recipe for some fun stamps but the issues reverted to the pan Arabist 70s UN style.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to the brave souls that pedal crazy stamp ideas to bands of fighters in Arab civil wars. Imagine trying to pose the question to them, “What do you guys think of the Flemish Masters, framed in gold?” Come again tomorrow when there will be another story to be learned from stamp collecting.

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Australia 1959, 100 years of Queensland

Queensland had the the largest proportion of the Aboriginal of the Australian British Colonies. So some methods were used that are being re-evaluated in the period since this stamp. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The stamp issue decided to show the Parliament House in Brisbane along with the delightful second color of the flowers. The communicates two things. The proposition that it was the settlers that brought civilization and in a Parliament House it was showing that despite the Queensland name, this was a group that was going to govern themselves. Not modern by any stretch but I find it a convincing argument from such a small piece of gummed paper.

Todays stamp is issue A116, a four penny stamp issued by Australia on June 5th, 1959. It was a single stamp remembering when the Queensland territory was broken off from the New South Wales Colony. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used. I think the top edge of my copy comes from being at the top row of the stamp sheet.

The first British permanent settlement was yes a penal colony set up in 1823 in what is now the business district of Brisbane. The first ship full of immigrants arrived in 1848. Before the Europeans about 40% of the aboriginal residents of Australia were in Queensland. Soon the widely spead out European outposts, many of the “British” were actually Irish, were getting attacked. A female lead station was attacked and massacred in 1857. The horror was addressed by petitioning to Queen Victoria that Queensland be governed more directly.

Queen Victoria granted the request and George Bowen was named first Governor. He was Irish and also had colonial stints also in New Zealand, Victoria, Mauritius, and Hong Kong. He recruited a mounted, British lead, but Aboriginal staffed police force. Where Aboriginals massed for a raid on an outpost the horse mounted force would hopefully arrive to disperse them.

In the modern telling of this, the force would randomly start killing aboriginals. The numbers cited are always rising and at last imagined count, are up to 40,000 killed. This is course to dwarf and marginalize the deaths of the 1500 British in these, remember, Aboriginal started raids.

Mid massacre fantasy. Notice the fellows spear is but a line, his poor stomach is sunken in and his back turned. No room for nuance in this visual

The most interesting aspect of all this is to blame the alleged indiscriminate killing  on the remember Aboriginal staffed police force. That way you can blame the Europeans for poor management that people may believe while having the actual barbarism  not committed by great, great Grandpa, something that people won’t yet believe. All to make the Aboriginal wonder why it was not them who brought civilization. I know, they were more at one with Mother Earth.

To put meat of the bone of these stories you need a villain. The moderns have found one in Irish officer with the nefarious name John O Connell Bligh. There was an enquiry in period as to why no prisoners were ever taken by Bligh’s unit. He said they were shot trying to escape. After he was cleared, the town of Maryborough awarded him a ceremonial sword to thank him for his help. What a perfect story to say Europeans bad.

John OConnell Bligh. Never trust a man with a pocket watch and a ceremonial sword

Well my drink is empty. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting