VILLAIN #1 ~ AUSTRALIA POST

Stamp collecting should be fun. It is usually much less fun that it ought to be, though. The chief culprit is Australia Post. It was not until I began buying stamps over the Internet some six month ago that I began to realise how glacially slow the Australian postal system has become. Is it only because I so eagerly await the arrival of every batch of stamps I order that I have noticed the paradox that in the so-called age of global communications mail in this country seems to have slowed to something like it must have been before World War II? Surely someone else has noticed this too???

Let me give an example. On the day of writing, Friday, November 19, a small package of about ten stamps still hasn't arrived from Russia, a package that, the seller assures me, she posted on October 19. An envelope containing a Manchukuo first day cover still hasn't reached me - although it was posted in London on November 8. How can it take longer than a few days for a letter to reach Sydney from London? Even in 1980, when I was living in London, mail between the cities took an average of 5-7 days and never more than 7. A third item was posted in Turkey on the same date but also still hasn't arrived.

You can say if you like that there's nothing unusual about letters taking a long time to come from places like Russia and Turkey, which are presumably steeped in bureaucratic inefficiency, but it's hard to say that about London. In any case, my worst two experiences so far concern the United States. This year, the longest an item took to arrive was 7 weeks; this item, which consisted of just a few stamps, was posted in Florida. The second longest was a small packet of 138 stamps posted in New York, which took five weeks to arrive. Both these items were, of course, sent by air mail. The inordinate length of time they took to arrive rather makes a mockery of the very idea of air mail, since it seems that the envelopes bearing these items are spending most of their journey somewhere other than in the air. I strongly doubt that even in 1930 items sent by air took as long as 5 or 7 weeks to reach Australia from the U.S. I wonder whether I might receive my stamps more expeditiously if I asked sellers to send my items across the ocean by canoe or overland by camel train.

In the last six months, I've probably ordered around 100-120 packets of stamps from overseas. In only a handful of cases did a packet arrive in a period of less than 9 or 10 days. The average probably has been about 9-10 days, which is considerably longer than international mail has taken for decades. Given that, in 1995, mail between Vienna and Sydney took an average of just three days, I must admit to being completely baffled by this unexpected situation.

The advent of Internet shopping is supposed to have brought us a step closer towards the nirvana of instant consumer gratification. Yet if you live in metropolitan Sydney - not in the sticks, but right in the heart of one of the world's major cities - that promise is denied by the astonishing slowness of the Australian postal system. Half the time I've almost forgotten what I've ordered before the stamps reach me. Few things dampen the pleasure of stamp collecting as much as having to wait weeks for an item to arrive. Few things seem as inexplicable. Am I the only person who wonders why, in this so-called age of rapid global communications, the postal system has made a leap backwards into the era before I was even born? What's happened? And why?

ABOUT ME

As a child I was a fairly avid stamp collector. I took up stamp collecting because, in the mid-'60s, petrol stations often handed out free packets of CTO stamps to their customers. My father passed them to me and encouraged me to take up collecting. Shortly afterwards, this nice old lady who lived behind us heard about my new enthusiasm for stamps and gave me the bulk of her collection, which consisted mostly of Australian, British and Empire/Commonwealth stamps, but included a smattering of issues from almost every country in the world. While she regaled me with homemade ginger beer, she taught me the fundamentals of stamp collecting and how to use Stanley Gibbons' Simplified Stamp Catalogue 1954, which I still have among my possessions today.

My passion for stamps, which by 1970 was focused on the issues from the English island of Lundy, vanished in the summer of 1970/71, when I got into rock music in a big way. My old school exercise books tell the story of the transformation in unambiguous terms: on one page of my schoolbooks I was listing the newest issues from exotic-sounding places like Tanzania, Nauru and Tristan da Cunha - on the next were crude drawings of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and scribbled declarations such as 'Led Zeppelin forever!'

Only earlier this year (2010), when I was moving house and I came across remnants of the collections of stamps the old lady had given me over 40 years ago, did my old enthusiasm flare up again. As I was overcome with a debilitating illness that left me largely housebound and in pain much of the time, stamp collecting appealed to me more and more as a means of distracting myself from the terrible onward progress of my mysterious illness.

As the year comes to an end, my affliction has faded into a distant memory, but stamps have come to preoccupy me as nothing else has done in a very long time. Collecting, as most collectors, will admit, is an addiction and today my life largely revolves large around the stamps I'm buying and selling. It all could be so easy and enjoyable - but funnily enough it isn't. This blog is a place for me to vent some of the frustrations that I, as a stamp collector, feel at the massive ineptitude of Australia Post, the 'bargain basement' mentality introduced by Ebay's predominance in the stamp market, and the very strange, and highly questionable business model brought into the world by a vicious beast called Paypal.

 I don't know who will find this blog interesting, but I guess there's always a chance that what I write will ring true to other collectors.