Animal instincts

Some days, as a stamp collector, you can miss the joy. The simple pleasures that once drew us into this mess can get lost in the drudgery of accumulation, sorting, storage, and, if you’re a glutton for punishment, the flagellation of exhibition.

The wider world can feel grimmer still. As some nations are threatened with oblivion, others vote for it. Inequality grows, and a good chunk of humanity wilfully ignores an unfolding environmental nightmare.

That’s where my mind has been in recent weeks, in between the kind of personal trials and tribulations that beset us all. Modern life can be a slog.

And then something like this comes along.

These recent ‘Animals’ stamps from Bosnia & Herzegovina came to me in a tweet by the philatelic busy bees at the Worldwide Online Philatelic Agency, aka WOPA+. And oh my, it brought me JOY.

(Not much joy remains on ‘X’. I’m heading for the exits like most other sane people. I’ll save that rant for another time.)

Back to the stamps. I immediately fell in love with them. Who’s your favourite? The close-up perspective and the character in each face make it hard not to smile back. You could question the intended fates of at least four of the obliviously happy creatures, but I say, away with your cynicism! There are SO MANY animal stamps, and they are often illustrated ‘straight’; it’s a credit to the designer Danijela Popovic that this set is so engaging.

Once I saw this bunch, it took me about ten seconds to clip up the duck and text it to my wife. Regular listeners of our podcast would know that she’s not a collector, but she does love ducks. She has a real talent for knowing what animals are saying, and in this case, she declared that it’s: “WHA????” I have no reason to disbelieve her.

Looking at these stamps, I felt like a kid again, delighting in them just because they’re fun. Some collectors sniff at modern issues because they can lack the value, scarcity, gravitas, and printing varieties that are cherished by serious philatelists. Can you imagine a life so miserable? Leave them to it, and let the rest of us enjoy a stamp because we like the picture.

When people ask me why I collect (no really, people sometimes ask), one of the answers is that there’s a certain zen that comes from appreciating tiny works of miniature art. That might mean scrutinising a 19th-century rarity under a magnifying glass and marvelling at the engraver’s skill, but it could also mean that a pig is grinning at me like an idiot.

I genuinely appreciated the mental break that these wacky animals gave my brain, especially given that they interrupted a moment of doomscrolling through X/Twitter where so much is now anger, misinformation and AI-generated clickbait. I marvelled that this respite from the world’s ills had arrived courtesy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation that was, not too long ago, the epicentre of the very worst of human conflict.

I looked into that a little more, and as often happens when I explore the origin stories of stamps, I was forced to confront my ignorance.

When I’ve seen Bosnia & Herzegovina at the Olympic Games or in other international environments, I’ve assumed that the wars of the 1990s were somehow consigned to the past, and that the country now functions as a unified state. But that’s not true; it’s still largely divided along the ethnic battle lines of the war, with two virtual sub-countries (plus one self-governing city) running their own affairs. That division extends to postal services; these animal stamps come from Posta Srpske, based in Repubika Srpska, the Serbian-majority entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the other entity, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), the post is split again, with BH Posta serving the Bosniak population, and Hrvatska pošt Mostar serving Croat-majority areas.

(Are you following? I’ll never complain about trying to calculate an Australian parcel rate again.)

So if you collect stamps of Bosnia and Herzegovina, are you collecting one country, or three? I’m not sure. But if it’s any consolation, they all seem to agree that stamps should commemorate old, dead Germans.

Reading further, I learned that Bosnia and Herzegovina is now in a precarious position, because the current leadership of Republic Srpska wants to secede. RS President Milorad Dodik has passed a number of laws that have been criticised by the international community. He has also criminalised defamation, which happens to be something that leaders do when they want to stifle freedom of speech. The politicians in the other half of the country have no shortage of local critics either.

So it goes. The real world intrudes and our moment of joy ends.

Even without my wife’s translation, I think the rooster says it all.

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