"Paid All" Markings : NSW To US 1874>

New South Wales "PAID ALL" Markings on Letters Addressed to the United States,
1874-1891.

Before the establishment of the Universal Postal Union, the Government of the United
States negotiated numerous Postal Conventions with foreign governments around the
world. A Postal Convention between the United States and New Zealand was negotiated
in 1870 and came into operation on December 1, 1870.

Similar Postal Conventions came into effect with New South Wales on 1 February 1874;
with Queensland on 1 January 1876; with Victoria on 1 July, 1878; and with Tasmania on
1 July 1886. All of the Conventions became redundant when New Zealand and the
Australian Colonies joined the U.P.U. on October 1. 1891. (The United States had no
Postal Conventions with South Australia and Western Australia)

The Postal Conventions applied to trans-Pacific transport of the mails and specified the
port cities in each country between which the postal services were to operate. All of the
mails between the United States and its convention partners in the Pacific were routed
through San Francisco.
Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; Sydney, New South Wales; Brisbane,
Queensland; Melbourne, Victoria; and Hobart, Tasmania were the exchange offices for
the several colonies.

Spelled out in each of the Postal Conventions was the requirement that fully-prepaid
letters be marked on the front with a bold "PAID ALL" in red ink: underpaid letters
accepted for transmittal were to be marked the amount of
underpayment in black ink. The cover shown on the front of this magazine and the one
below illustrate different types of "PAID ALL" markings applied in Sydney to mail sent
to the United States. (A third type is shown on the cover of the Summer 1996 issue of
The Informer.)

J. Edgar Williams and I are attempting to identify the different types of "PAID ALL"
instruments and solicit our reader's help. The results of our study will be reported in The
Informer. This effort is just beginning and we have a long way to go. Ed has reported on
his study of New Zealand's markings (see The Informer (Vol. 55, No. 1, p.7) but more
types may yet be found. Several types of N.S.W. markings have been identified, but the
years before 1887 are not well covered, little has yet been accumulated on Queensland or
Victoria, and nothing on Tasmania.

We need photocopies of the front and back of covers bearing "PAID ALL" markings,
mailed to the United States from any of the five colonies in the years that the Postal
Conventions were in force.
The "Postal Convention Between the United States of America and the Colonial
Government of New South Wales" is reproduced on pages 22-23 following. The Postal
Conventions between the United States, New Zealand, and the other Australian Colonies
will be reproduced in coming issues of The Informer.
—Hugh Wynn
The informer winter 1996/1997








Reproduced with permission.
"The Informer"
Philatelic Journal of the society of Australian Specialists / Oceania
http://www.sasoceania.org/informer.htm

No reproduction without citing of source.