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Monday Morning Brief | Take a journey with travel poster stamps

Apr 29, 2021, 5 AM

Climb aboard the trans-Australian railway and explore other modes of transportation with Linn’s senior editor Denise McCarty, as she highlights stamps depicting travel posters.

Full Video Transcript:

Welcome to the Monday Morning Brief for August 21, 2017.

It’s back to school time again which reminds me of one of the benefits of stamp collecting: their educational value.

Not only can they help you learn about history, geography and much more, they also can take you places you may never be able to travel yourself.

And a recent set of two stamps from Australia even help you travel back in time a little bit, courtesy of some vintage travel posters.

Issued July 4, the stamps honor the 100th anniversary of the completion of the trans-Australian railway, which officially opened October 22, 1917.

In announcing the stamps, Australia Post said, “The railways brought comfort and speed to east-west travel and it boosted tourism. When the standard-gauge line was extended, in 1969, west from Kalgoorlie to Perth and east from Port Augusta to Sydney, it made it possible to travel coast to coast across Australia by train.”

The stamp designs picture travel posters from 1930 — that’s the one with the camel — and from 1960.

Travel by train is not the only kind of transportation featured on stamps that show vintage travel posters.

In 2004, Australia issued a set of four stamps reproducing the designs of posters promoting travel on passenger ships.

And, you can find a plane on one of the stamps in the United States Postal Service’s March 7 issue of this year that features posters of the WPA, the Work Projects Administration.

Many other types of travel are pictured on stamps in that issue, and there are even more on a pane of 20 stamps released by New Zealand in 2013.

Called Classic Travel Posters, that stamp issue invites you to “take a step back in time to an era before the internet, colour television and even colour photography …”

So if need a break this week from work, school or anything else, you may want to get out your stamp album and search for some more vintage travel posters on stamps.

For Linn’s Stamp News and the Scott catalogs, I’m Denise McCarty. Keep up on the latest stamp news by following Linn’s Stamp News on Facebook and Twitter.