The Stamp & The Story.

Boab stamp in its complete set.



The Prison Boab trees near Derby, Western Australia with a circumference of over 14 metres. It was used as an overnight prison cell in the 1890s for Aborigines on their way to Derby for sentencing. The nearby one at Wyndham has an even larger circumference of 14.7 metres!

KGV....loved it.
A nice short story together with stamps and photo.

Can I make a suggestion as the topic title is well suited for everyone.

Let us all add a nice 'story' to this thread, in similar style.
It would make a great factual Philatelic thread and can be never ending.

How about it?

Londonbus1

Great stamps and story KGV. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Dianne

Thanks for that, KGV, really interesting, and great Aussie tree stamps.




Londonbus, I agree, if KGV doesn't mind us hijacking his thread
I'm off to find a stamp and a story!!

Thanks for sharing a great story with very nice stamps.




Butch

Bizarre tree and interesting story. In french the boab tree is called baobab. So there is an australian baobab. I thought they grow only in Africa. The largest tree in America is the sequoia and I kept in memory this picture.

State Name with Floral emblem.
Western Australia: Kangaroo Paw
Victoria: Pink Heath
Tasmania: Tasmanian Blue Gum
South Australia & Northern Territory: : Sturt's Desert Pea
Queensland: Cooktown Orchid
New South Wales: Waratah


One of the Indigenous stories about the waratah.
Long ago, in the Dreamtime, all the waratah flowers were white. In the forest where the waratah bushes grew live Wonga the pigeon with her mate. All day they fed side by side on the forest floor & at night they slept in the warmth of each other's feathers. They never left the forest. They knew that hawk lived in the blue sky above the forest.

One day wonga was separated from her mate. She searched & searched but could not find him. It was getting dark so in desperation wonga flew above the forest calling, calling...

Hawk spied her & plummeted towards her, tearing her breast as wonga fled back into the safety of the trees. Hearing her mate calling her she flew from waratah to waratah, resting on each flower for a little before struggling on. This is why the waratah flower is red but why you will very occasionally still find a rare white waratah.

Thanks to all for the very kind words. John & family

Top stuff KGV

I love stories when one can connect them to stamps.
Makes great reading.

Thanks.

Londonbus1

The sheet was issued as part of the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem. The citizens of Israel were reminded of the story on Independence day, 1967 by the song of the same name by Naomi Shemer.

So what is the story of JERUSALEM OF GOLD that is depicted on this Miniature Sheet ??

It appears in a story in the Talmud.

Rabbi Akiva was uneducated and worked as a shepherd for a rich man in Jerusalem. The rich man had a daughter, Rachel, who fell in love and married the poor Rabbi. Her father was outraged and dispossessed her.
The poor couple lived in a hayloft and each morning, the Rabbi would clean Rachel's hair of the hay. He promised to buy her a piece of precious Jewllery to wear in her hair.
Rachel encouraged her husband to study the Torah and paid for the studies by selling her hair. He studied hard and eventually became a great Torah scholar with over 12,000 followers. Rachel's father acknowledged his achievement and they returned to the family. He bestowed upon the couple all his wealth.
The rabbi kept his promise and bought his wife a circlet of Gold for her hair.The design resembled the Jerusalem City walls and so became known as the 'JERUSALEM OF GOLD'.
Similar items of jewellery were popular and brides wore copies until the Roman Occupation when they were banned for being symbols of Jewish Nationalism.
And so the phrase 'Jerusalem of Gold' was forgotten until Naomi Shemer's song in 1967.

And now it will live on forever and not forgotten, in Philately at least, with this beautiful sheet, parts of which are 22 carat Gold, including the word Jerusalem [written in Hebrew] on the Circlet.

Acknowledgments: GSM and Israel Post.

Londonbus1

THE ANNE FRANK TREE

Anne Frank, a young teenager, victim of the Holocaust and writer of a diary that became known to the world in one of the bestselling books of all time.



Behind the house where she was hiding in from June 1942 until August 1944 stood a Chestnut tree, much loved by Anne and mentioned a number of times in her writings.

In 2007, the tree was found to have a strong fungus which was killing the bark, but was preserved due to a Foundation who paid for, and built a construction to support the tree.

Sadly, in August of this year, 2010, strong winds in Amsterdam blew down the tree and only one metre remains above the ground.



The Anne Frank Tree

--------------------------------------------------------------

Anne Frank died from Typhus in the Nazi concentration Camp, Bergen-Belsen in 1945 just a short time before the camp was liberated by the British.
The dead inmates were buried in mass graves.
Large parts of the camp were burned down due to the outbreak of the desease. The whereabouts of Anne Frank's body are unknown.

Londonbus1

Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem's Old City walls was built by Suleiman in the 16th Century. It is the only gate to be built at a right angle to the wall.
During the latter part of the Ottoman rule a number of buildings were erected around the Old City including a Clocktower by the Jaffa Gate.
This took 6 years to build and was completed in 1907. However, it only stood for 10 years until the British Occupation, who knocked it down along with other buildings to preserve the historical outlook of the Old City.



Londonbus1

Wot !
No one has a little story to tell

How about this then?





During WWII, the United States top-secret "Manhattan Project" was based on the theory that land invasion of Japan lay ahead and consequently American manpower and material was poured into the Vanuatu region. Construction was very rapid and in just weeks the locations were transformed into bustling American military hubs. Both bases processed half a million soldiers. (In comparison, the entire native population of Vanuatu at the time was 60,000).

As it turned out, however, the South Pacific theatre had been oversupplied for its brief stint in the war, and combat-based military activity on Vanuatu was short-lived. Action quickly moved north toward Japan, and barely six months after the bases' completion, Vanuatu comprised the extreme rear of the American line. Although both bases performed important roles in the battles of Guadalcanal—Efate had the chief hospital, and Santo, which possessed the southernmost American airstrip, received wounded soldiers and combat equipment—they were primarily utilised as holding grounds and outfitting stations.

When the war ended, the Vanuatu holdings constituted a daunting pile of poorly organised, mislabelled crates. To compound the problem, four years in the jungle had deteriorated some of the material; shipping costs were expensive, and only a handful of soldiers remained on the islands to sort and distribute the cargo. The storage on Vanuatu was never touched again, and at the end of the war, sometime between August 1945 and December 1947, the US military interred some nine million tons of material, supplies, equipment, and vehicles, valued at nearly four billion dollars, under water. This dumping or scuttling consisted of jeeps, bulldozers, ships, trucks, cranes and even supplies of coca cola.

The huge task, known as Operation Roll-Up, was hindered at all levels by the logistics of immense disposal and was strained by the pressure to bring American troops home. According to demands from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the United States donated some supplies to South Pacific islands to aid post-war reconstruction but only when efforts at redistribution and sale failed. 90% of the property however was destroyed or dumped into the sea.

Today this "monument" to WWII remains as one of Vanuatu's most popular dive sites with a range of depths for viewing of between 5 and 30 metres.

Sorry, double post.

Australian Parrots 2005 8 Feb ~ complete set



Schotia brachypetala ~ Tree Fuchsia or Drunk Parrot tree; a semi~evergreen tree or large shrub whose brilliant red flowers at the end of summer are full of a sugary nectar that ferments in the heat & is responsible for this...



inebriated parrots, passed out under the trees, falling from the sky & otherwise displaying all the attributes of being over the limit!

Tinus_NL & Londonbus: Thank you for your contributions. It's a pleasure to read the stories others know about their stamp collections.