Western Australia: The 4d Lithograph, 1854-1864

Brian Pope’s prize-winning essay in the J. R. W. Purves Competition was entitled Western Australia: The 4d Lithograph 1854-1864. This has been published as the fourth volume in the J. R. W. Purves Memorial Series.
The 52-page monograph covers the whole story of one of Australia’s most notable and certainly, because of the inverted frame variety-one of its most famous stamps. The work is copiously illustrated to demonstrate the printing technique and the resultant varieties.
The sequence of printing stones and the printings made from them outlined by Pope are fully supported by both archival and philatelic evidence, and seem unlikely to be challenged in the future. While acknowledging the work of previous workers, most notably Chadwick and Purves, previous theories have had to be modified in the light of the discovery of the printing records (found by Pope in the Western Australian archives), and the spectacular re-appearance of the intermediate stone in 1979.
A guide to the varieties on the common printing stone (”2A”) is given, and the complete plating of this may be feasible (a complete sheet of 240 remains intact in the Royal collection). The rare first printing, from printing stone l, which had at least one major crease through several units is a different story-pope knows of no multiple larger than a pair.
An appendix gives the biographies (i.e., pedigrees) of the 15 known copies of the inverted frame, by L. N. Williams. The front cover and frontispiece hive an enlarged reproduction of the Royal collection’s copy.

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