Before email and online payments spelled their precipitous decline, there was a time when people paid attention to postage stamps. You didn’t even have to be a collector to appreciate the quirky and rare among stamps that were used to mail bills, letters and postcards. Nowadays philately, or stamp collecting, has been all but stamped out. But stamps were given a longer lease of life in Indonesia. Though the average age of collectors worldwide is 65 to 70, collectors in Indonesia tend to be younger and still consider stamps objects of beauty.
The whole kaleidoscope of the nation’s history, geography, culture and politics can be seen its postage stamps. World Post Day, which fell on October 9th, is an appropriate time to celebrate Indonesia’s colorful and unique postal history which began when it was still under the yoke of Dutch colonialism. The earliest “stamps” were actually postal seals printed with the amount of the postal fee due. These date from the very start of the VOC era in 1602 and were in use up to the issuance of the first Netherlands East Indies stamp in 1864 which bore the likeness of King Willem III.
The Japanese occupation (1942-1945) of the Dutch East Indies in World War II, a time of extreme hardship for the population, saw a wide variety of stamps issued that facilitated the politicization of Indonesians and lauded the occupier’s efforts to educate, train and arm many young Indonesians in their war effort. The occupiers gave nationalist leaders a political voice for the first time. These old stamps today are priced as high as Rp1 to Rp5 million each.
When the Netherlands sought to reclaim the Indies after the war in 1945, a bitter four-year diplomatic, military and social struggle ensued, resulting in the colonialists recognizing Indonesian sovereignty in December 1949. During this revolutionary period, the new republic’s first stamps made their debut in the nationalist strongholds of Java and Sumatra. On these early stamps appeared the very first use of the word ‘Indonesia.’
The new government designed all stamps and made all decisions concerning production and distribution. At first printed by the Austrian State Printing Office, the Indonesian nationalist authorities ordered the new stamps inscribed with “Republik Indonesia.” The commemorative stamp issued on the 5th anniversary of the Proclamation of Independence in 1950 featured the Garuda Pancasila, the national emblem of Indonesia. No longer was a stamp just proof of payment of postage costs, but was made to perform a variety of missions and functions from five year plans and empowerment of women to the scout movement and anti-mosquito campaigns.
A peculiarity of Indonesia’s postal history is the use of overprinted stamps. Captured stocks of Netherlands East Indies stamps were overprinted by Japanese administrative machine imprints on different islands. When the war for independence started, the Dutch set up military blockades that hindered the coordination of stamp issues, so old Dutch Indies stamps were overprinted with republican images across republican-controlled territories. Ironically, some early stamps even bore pre-war Netherlands East Indies postmarks. These hybrid stamps, which bear the scars of wars, rebellions and annexations, often evade the radar of philatelists and do not even appear in specialized catalogues of the original stamp issuing entities.
Historic figures from Indonesia’s formative years – R.A. Kartini, General Soedirman, M. H. Thamrin, Sultan Hassanudin and Agus Salim – are reissued again and again. During the Suharto era, which lasted over 30 years, the president’s image was ubiquitous on series after series of stamp in whole ranges of stamp values, just as Sukarno’s visage was popular on stamps 30 plus years earlier. Indonesian stamps that mark unique historical occasions include whole series that commemorate political entities that never came to fruition. During this early tumultuous period, when the archipelago was shaken by internal separatist revolt, saw the issuance of stamps by self-proclaimed breakaway regions of the former Netherlands Indies that tried to form their own alternative governments, but were put down by the central government troops. These include the Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia (PRRI) in Sumatra, the RepublikIndonesia Serikat (RIS) and the Republic Maluku Selatan (RMS).
A number of rudimentary yet dignified old stamps commemorating the founding of the republic picture symbols of sovereignty and famous historical events in the country’s early formative years such as the Battle of Surabaya on November 19th, 1945. Amazingly, early Indonesian nationalist leaders idolized America’s founding fathers. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are pictured alongside early Indonesian statesmen. Nationalist heroes who fought against the Dutch are often the subject of stamps: in 1999, the Moluccan freedom fighter Martha Christina Tiahahu. The fourth Governor of Irian Barat Frans Kaisiepo (1921-1979) was the first to propose the name Irian for the new province.
During the the regime of Sukarno, the Bandung Conference in April 1955 between 29 newly independent Asian and African states, was an important step in the global non-aligned movement, representing one-quarter of the Earth’s land surface with a total population of 1.5 billion people. To show the first president’s solidarity with other third-world countries where the oppressed masses live, Sukarno poses with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and North Korea’s founder Kim IlSung. Stamps issued during Sukarno’s violent Konfrontasi campaign (1963-1966) with East Malaya on the border between Kalimantan and North Borneo, are even rare among philatelists specializing in Malaysia. Though there’s no Inverted Jenny (the famous upside down airplane of U.S. postal history) in Indonesian philately, these come the closest. Interestingly, these militarized stamps carry two different overprints from two different foreign countries – Japan and Malaya.
The all-important preservation of Indonesian national unity and the ongoing existence of this impossibly fragmented and diverse country is a recurrent theme of the nation’s stamps. Though provincial stamps may highlight events, cultures and products – the Pasola jousting match of Sumba or the distinctive traditional dwellings of Central Kalimantan – the issuance of regional stamps reinforce and propagate national unity.
After Dutch New Guinea was wrested away from the colonialists and incorporated into Indonesia in 1963, regular Indonesian postage stamps were overprinted with “Irian Barat” and stamps were issued that commemorated Indonesian parachute landings and the Battle of the 1962 Arafura Sea. Another stamp issued after the annexation shows two Indonesian flags planted at both ends of this sprawling 3200-km-long 17,000-plus island archipelago, marking the outer boundaries exemplified in the national motto “Dari Sabang ke Merauke” (From Sabang to Merauke) that epitomizes the overriding obsession that Indonesians have for their territorial sovereignty.
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