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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Postcards & Stamps / Western Australia Stamp Collection, Ca. 275 Issues 1854-1912, Swan Type & Later
Oceania, Australia, Colony of Western Australia. A working philatelist's hoard of roughly 275 postage stamps from the Colony of Western Australia, spanning the first imperforate issues of 1854 through the Commonwealth-era printings of 1912. The run is dominated by the celebrated Black Swan design, the colony's armorial bird rendered in engraved and later lithographed and typographed plates, in denominations from the penny to the higher shilling values, with perforation, watermark, and shade variants of interest to the specialist. The collection is housed, with a certain mechanical wit, in a repurposed vinyl three-ring binder issued as a Chevrolet "Flat Rate Schedule for All Passenger Cars" for the 1969, 1970, and 1971 model years, its cover still bearing the dealership service emblem and a handwritten inventory label. Western Australia issued its first adhesive postage in August 1854, among the earliest stamps of the Australian colonies. The inaugural one-penny black was engraved by William Humphrys after a drawing of the black swan, Cygnus atratus, the bird that gave the Swan River Colony its name and still anchors the state's coat of arms. Subsequent printings by Perkins Bacon, and later lithographed and surface-printed locals, produced an unusually rich field of plate flaws, the most famous being the 1854 four-penny "Inverted Swan," one of the great classical rarities of the British Empire. After federation in 1901 the colony continued issuing its own stamps until the Commonwealth assumed postal authority, with Western Australian issues remaining valid into the 1910s. The 1854-1912 span represented here therefore brackets the colony's entire independent philatelic life. Item # 203628
Estimate:$700
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPostcards & Stamps
Estimate:
$700
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