Cuckoos In The Cook
pp. 37-39 · Read in the full issue
Islands' Stamp Nest
From a special correspondent
Stamp collecting is like many another hobby. The enthusiast is frequently committed to the acquisi tion and study of objects and trivia, which in themselves have little or no intrinsic value. This is particularly true of philately, where there is devotion to tiny scraps of coloured paper, which, but for the support of the hobbyist and the philatelic entre preneur, would normally be con signed to the scrapheap or the in cinerator.
Therefore, it seems to be a retreat from reality to suggest that it is improper for the nations of the world to profit, often very handsomely, from the idiosyncratic behaviour of the stamp collector, naive and gullible though it may be on many occasions.
There is nothing which is more im noral in financing government projects from the sale of stamps to philatelists than there is in conducting lotteries to pay for opera houses, or taxing ooker machines in order to provide for hospitals and homes for the aged.
Gone are the days when stamps, were mundane, monochromatic, and bore the likenesses of a dreary pro cession of heads of states. We are now in the era of the multivaried, multicoloured, multivalued and multi sized stamps and the issuing agencies are literally queueing up to make one issue after another which will titillate the fancies of the thematic collector, and good luck to them.
However, surely there should be some rules of fair play in these matters. Is it asking too much to suggest that when a thematic issue is made, which by import at least, would lead the collector to believe that natural objects, flowers, animals, sea shells and so on are, in fact, to be found in that country the information, stated and implied on the stamps, should have been thoroughly re searched and is accurate?
Thematic issues, like women’s dresses and men’s shirts follow fashions, and the successful sea-shell issue of Papua New Guinea seems to
have been a trend-setter in the Pacific Island countries as the Cook Islands has followed suit with two issues, one for the Cook Islands and one for Aitutaki.
The reasons for this double issue must be another story; here we are interested in the veracity of the information on the stamps. A col
The stamp pictured at the top is one of the cuckoos, Aulica vespertiiio, which has an area of distribution from the Philip pines to Papua New Guinea and Northern Australia, but not in the Cooks, says ex pert Mr Cernohorsky. The lower stamp is a Terebra areolata and not, as the stamp says, Tenebra muscaria.
league, who has some amateur know ledge of Pacific Islands stamps, sug gested to me that the shells depicted as being Cook Islands do not ring true and he sought the opinion of Walter O. Cernohorsky, who is curator of Molluscs at the Auckland Institute and Museum, and is pre eminent in his knowledge of the oc currence and distribution of Pacific Islands molluscs.
His interest was not unfounded as Mr Cernohorsky’s reply has shown.
“I have made several notes prior to my departure (on a field-trip to Fiji), with the intention of submitting a full report on these inexcusable errors to the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs in the Cook Islands,” he writes.
“Since there are so many books on the market on Pacific shells, or at least illustrating Pacific shells, there is absolutely no excuse for both issues containing errors in identification, misspellings and featuring shells which do not even live in the Cook Islands.
I wonder what experts would say if Qatar or Abu Dhabi issued a stamp set of native animals and featured on their stamps the emu, koala and kangaroo from Australia and the kiwi and tuatara from New Zealand? The same applies to the Cook-Aitutaki stamps, except that being shells, the errors are less obvious to the un initiated. They should take an example from the shell-stamp set of Papua New Guinea, which did not contain a single error and all species were very faithfully reproduced. Of the 14 stamps issued (in the Cook Islands series) as many as six stamps have either misspellings or the species de picted do not even live in the Cooks”.
Mr Cernohorsky gives us some examples to support his condemna tion of the contents of these issues. 3c value: Aulica vesper tilio L.
Cymbiola vespertilio Linnaeus, The species is assigned to the wrong genus in the stamp and does not live in the Cook Islands. Its area of distribution is from the Philippines to New Guinea and Northern Australia. 10c value: Tenebra muscaria Lam. = Terebra areolata Link. The generic name has been misspelled Tenebra instead of Terebra, and the correct name for the species depicted on the stamp is Terebra areolata and not muscaria Of the $1 Aitutaki value: Biplex perca Mr Cernohorsky says “This species does not live in the Cooks; not even in the central Pacific and is known from Taiwan, Japan, China and that area.”
The Cook Islands issued two more stamps in mid-July to commemorate the Centenary of the Universal Postal Union. The designs show a map of Aitutaki, the Universal Postal Union symbol, and four early stamps of Aitutaki.