Perth, Australia

Well, it looks like I won't be posting about old cards for a while now... I've got quite a few new ones in the mail in the past few days and I want to share those here first.



This one arrived a couple of days ago and is a swap with Bonnie in Perth, Western Australia. Perth has fascinated me for quite a while as it's such an isolated place. It's pretty difficult for me to comprehend just how big Australia is, mainly I think because it's so far away and I'm not very familiar with the country. What wikipedia says is that "Perth is one of the most isolated metropolitan areas on earth. The nearest city to Perth with a population over one million is Adelaide in South Australia, which is 2,104 kilometres away. Perth is geographically closer to East Timor, Singapore and Jakarta (Indonesia), than it is to Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane." So... to put that into perspective, it's like from Birmingham to Barcelona or Rome!

Bonnie tells me that this picture is taken from Kings Park, which is a very beautiful botanical garden with lots of different plants and flowers. It also has very good views of Perth and the Swan River.



The stamp is from a set of 4 stamps issued in 2009, representing Australian Waterfalls. This one shows Russell Falls in Tasmania.

I used to get some very cool stamps from Australia many years ago but nowadays most of my cards from there have these "International" stamps on, I haven't seen too many "domestic" stamps on my mail (although I did get one such card today, I'll post about it later). I did find an explanation on the postcrossing forum, though. Apparently, stamps for use in Australia need to have GST (Goods and Services Tax) paid on them whereas International stamps don't. Therefore as soon as you use non international stamps you must add 10% extra to make up for the GST. Now the International stamps are pretty nice, but it's still a shame you hardly ever see the domestic stamps as there would be more variety that way. And Australian stamps are amongst my favourite stamps!