Anniversaries 1973

The 3c design was completed by Vivian Jepsen, with the remaining five designs completed by B Langford.

Centennial of Thames Borough - 3c
The design shows old Pollen Street with the hills behind highlighted in symbolic gold.  Thames is a town with 7000 people, at the foot of the Coromandel Peninsula. Gold was first discovered nearby the town in the early 1850s, but it wasn't until an arrangement had been reached with the local Maori to allow prospecting of the area that a major strike was found in 1867. By 1870 the town of Shortland, as it was then called, had been established  with a population of around 20 000, greater than that of Auckland at that time.

Centennial of Westport Borough - 4c
Coal mining and pastoral development, major factors in Westport's economy, are shown in symbolic form.  Westport is a town with 4600 people, near the mouth of the Buller River, 105 km north-east of Greymouth. It is the commercial and administrative town and also the port for the Buller region, where the main industries are coal, saw-milling and farming. A Nelson surveyor, John Rochfort, discovered coal and gold in the region in 1859 and, within two years, a settlement was established.

Centennial of the University of Canterbury - 5c
A cloister, one of the features of the old University buildings, was included within the stamp design.  Canterbury University was established as Canterbury College in 1873 by the Provincial Council. Initially it had a staff of three professors and 87 students.

50th Anniversary of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society - 6c
This design incorporates the features important to this Society - forest and bird against a lake setting.

Olympic Rowers - 8c
The success of New Zealand rowers at the 1972 Olympics was the highlight of years of dedicated training and devotion to the sport.  Rowing, as a competitive sport, is believed to have begun in NZ on Lyttelton Harbour on New Year's Day in 1862. A number of clubs had formed throughout the country by the time the New Zealand Amateur Rowing Association was formed at a meeting of the representatives of nine clubs in 1887.  New Zealand's greatest rowing triumph came at the Olympic Games at Munich in 1972, when the eight won the gold medal (Hurt, Veldman, Joyce, Hunter, Wilson, Earle, Coker, Robertson, and Dickie, the cox), and the four (Tonks, Storey, Collinge and Mills) won the silver in their event.

25th Anniversary of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) - 10c
Depicted in symbolic form is the aim of the Commission - "progress through co-operation".

Stamp bulletin

This stamp issue first appeared in New Zealand Post Stamp Bulletin No. 8 in August 1972.

Acknowledgments: Bulletin scanned and provided by John Biddlecombe of the New Zealand Society of Great Britain. Their web site offers further information useful to those interested in the stamps and postal history of New Zealand. Link: http://www.nzsgb.org.uk/