PAPUA’S NEW STAMPS

Taranaki Daily News, 27 May 1933, Page 9 (Supplement)

PAPUA’S NEW STAMPS

THE BEST IN THE WORLD. RECORD OF NATIVE RITES. The Papuan post office has issued a wonderful series of stamps which it claims to be “the best in the world,” says the' Children’s Newspaper. This boast is open to discussion, but the stamps are unique inasmuch as the once-despised Australian Aborigine occupies pride of place in them. Almost every aspect of Papuan native life is illustrated. The halfpenny stamp shows a native girl wearing a grass skirt. She is carrying home firewood, and has a huge string-bag slung on her back. The penny one depicts a boy in full dancing dress wearing a necklace of dog’s teeth and plumes from the bird of paradise. The tree houses, used as a refuge in olden days, form tire subject of the three-halfpenny value. These houses were not used as dwellings, but simply as retreats when hostile tribes were near. On the threepenny stamp we see. a Papuan dandy complete with dog’stooth ornaments, plaited fibre armlets, and bird of paradise plumes. The bird of paradise itself is shown on the twopenny stamp, which also shows a boar’s tusk, while native money and shells appear in the border design. The fourpenny and sixpenny values are given up to Papuan mothers with their babies. On the one the mother is cooking with a native pot, while, on the other she is trudging along with her laden string-bag on her back and her child in her arms. A native fisherman appears on the ninepenny value. He is armed with a bow and arrows, and waits silently for a fish to come within shooting distance. The shilling stamp shows a strange wooden platform erected in the trees. This is known as a Dubii, and is supposed to be the resort of departed spirits. Here ceremonial feasts are held and rites performed, the Dubu being held in great reverence by all the tribe. A Papuan potter building up a clay bowl and a warlike native lighting a fire appear on the half-crown and tenshilling stamps respectively. A native ship is the subject of the one-and-threepenny stamp; while, various native objects, including a shield, a stone-headed club, and a skull appear on the two-shilling value. The pound stamp, showing a native dwelling, completes a fascinating issue. ECHO. You cannot see her. Never again will sweet, fleet Echo be seen. But you can still hear her, and if you are sad so is she, but if you call out joyfully to her sire is glad and answers you back happily. Her story is a strange one. Alas, once she talked too much, and was cruelly punished. In her quick, laughing voice Echo told wonderful tales to everybody who cared to listen to her, and when the great god Zeus was tired of all the serious work he had to do he would go to the cave where Echo lived and listen to her interesting stories. But Hera, the Queen of Zeus, was angry to think that her husband wasted so much time listening to a silly little cave nymph like Echo, and she went to her and told her that she talked too much. Echo argued and argued, determined to have the last word, and Hera punished her by taking away her sweet voice and leaving her only the power to repeat the last words spoken by other people. When Echo found that she could not speak she fled in shame and sorrow to the woods, and wept bitterly for the voice she had lost. One day a beautiful youth called Narcissus came hunting in those woods, and Echo followed him, hiding behind the trees, and after a time Narcissus lost his way. “Is there anybody here ?” he called. “Here 1” repeated Echo, glad to be able to speak to him. “Where?” he cried, “Come hither!” “Come hither!” answered Echo, and she ran out hoping that Narcissus would take pity on her and talk to her because she was so lonely. But Narcissus had no heart. He loved nobody but himself, and he pushed sad lonely Echo away because he did not want affection from anybody. Strange to say, people loved Narcissus directly they saw him, and poor Echo wept day and night because she was so fond of him, and then she pined away. At last her body vanished, and only her voice remained. Now she lives in -lonely places —caves, tunnels, hills, empty houses, and if you speak to her she still repeats your last words. t CLOCK THAT IS GOING AGAIN. SILENCE OF 165 YEARS. At Greenwich Observatory, the home of many clocks, a famous chronometer is working merrily again after a silence of 165 years. It is one of the most famous timepieces in the world. . Perhaps the most dramatic moment in its existence was on one. June morning in 1737 when “Land ahoy I” was shouted by the look-out man on H.M.S. Orford, ploughing her way home from Lisbon. Master Roger Wills, navigator of the ship,, and John Harrison, a Yorkshire carpenter of 44, hurried to the deck to see the cliffs of the Motherland. “That is Start Point,” ’declared the navigator, confident in his reckonings. “I fear you are mistaken,” said John Harrison, “it is the Lizard 1” A great argument arose, the officers supporting the. master, the carpenter insisting that he was right because he was confident that a precious clock he had spent seven years in making had not failed him. In a few minutes it was apparent to all on board that it was the Lizard. It was a triumphant homecoming for John Harrison, for he had won the prize offered by the Government for an accurate timepiece which would solve the Problem of the Longitude, a problem Sir Isaac Newton himself had declared unsolvable! It was in 1728 that John Harrison set out from Barrow to London with the plans of this clock. Bom at Foulby 35 years earlier, he was the son of a poor carpenter and received but little education; but as a child he loved to see the wheels go round and loved to take clocks to pieces. In 1715 he made an eight-day clock with wooden wheels, and ten years later he invented the wonderful compensating device which prevents our clocks from being upset by heat or cold. He also invented the device which keeps a clock going at its usual rate while being wound up. . In London George Graham, the chief clockmaker of the day, advised John to make his clock before entering for the £20,000 prize offered in the Act of 1713, and lent him £2OO. The voyage to Lisbon was to test this clock, and the correction of a degree and a half amazed the authorities, yet they quibbled about paying for it, and not until 1773, when he had made three more successful timepieces, did Harrison receive his pay. For 30 years the clock told Harrison the time at his home in Red Lion Square; then it was taken to Greenwich, where it went for six months until, neglected by all, it stopped. Here, in 1920, Commander Gould, an authority on the marine chronometer, found it and cleaned itj and it is owing to his devoted work on this national treasure that we can now see the hands of the seconds, the minutes, the hours, and the days moving round its four dials.