Queensland Fiscal Watermark

I just picked up some Revenues at my local stamp club auction. This item came with some others, and the price was extremely low, so I bought it. I see it as Queensland Fiscal Scott AR18 (perf 13), with pen cancel. (Stanley Gibbons F16.) Not much value, but fits into my collection.

The watermark appears backward. I'm used to my Scott catalog, which shows the watermark as viewed from the back. My Stanley Gibbons states that their watermarks are as viewed from the front. Here is the stamp and the picture of the watermark from Stanley Gibbons. What is interesting, is that my watermark is as shown when viewed from the back. (I mean to say that it is a perfect Q when viewed from the back.) Is this just an unlisted version?

If your stamp has something like the watermark you show, it can't be SG F16. That has the Type F3a watermark. Yours should be an SG F9, and in that case, the watermark is in the correct orientation: the Gibbons illustration shows 3a reversed when seen from the front, so correct when seen from the back.

Yes, my first illustration was wrong. But I scanned my stamp and the depiction from the Gibbons catalog. If the catalog is supposed to be the view from the front, then mine is reversed. Maybe the catalog is wrong? The Scott catalog agrees that the watermark is reversed. (Wmk 69 in Scott's)

That certainly looks like an SG F3a watermark.

The other point to bear in mind with Australian States watermarks is the general warning at the beginning of Gibbons' listings of the States: "Some stamp printers in the Australian States paid little attention to the position of the watermark ... Reversed ... watermarks are frequently encountered ...'

Excellent. That was the comment that I was missing when I looked through my catalogs,

To add to this of several yrs ago. The correct wmk position for this issue is reversed. That is all printings are printed on reversed paper. If you look from the front and you have a Q this is known as reversed, probably 5% of the printings.

This paper was only used for this revenue issue and no other Qld stamps are found with it.

Hope this clears this up.