sarawak stamps

Where is Sarawak? I have never been there, but it has come to me.

In the last post, I lamented about a collector who had pasted her stamps onto the pages of a spiral notebook, rendering over half of them unretrievable. I am still working on those, nearing the end at last. That's a problem: once I start, I can't finish.

So I have duly soaked, peeled, dried, and pressed hundreds of US stamps from the 1950s to 1970s. Sorting them by denomination this morning, I came across one from Sarawak. This was a new one for me but quick internet searching filled me in. What a time / place that must have been. You could go and resolve a dispute between the government and the governed and be awarded a huge chunk of land that stayed in your family for three generations -- except for four years of Japanese occupation during the war. I don't know the natives' perspective on it all, but the family claims to have respected the native traditions in the area, apart from headhunting, which was banned.