1956-04 souvenir sheet

The (edited) story below appeared in 'The Cinderella Philatelist' in July 2008.

This souvenir sheet item was printed by a large Melbourne printing and
stationery manufacturing firm which had produced a number of souvenirs for the
Games. Among them was a quantity of philatelic postcards with an aboriginal
motif. These had not sold well and the firm still had 50,000 left. What to do
with them? The owner of the firm came up with a rather wild idea of printing a
small miniature sheet reproducing in full colour the official set of four
Melbourne Games stamps, affixing them to the cards and attempting to sell them
as philatelic souvenirs.

Early in 1957 he put his ideas to the Postmaster General's Department which,
rather surprisingly in view of the traditional attitudes of the time, gave the
project its blessing. On 18th June 1957 the Director General of the Postmaster
General's Department, Mr. G. T. Chippendall, gave the firm the right to produce
the sheets on certain conditions. 

One condition was that the full colour illustration of the stamps must be in
slightly reduced size. 

The second condition was that a black overprint of a postmark be applied over
the stamps so they could not be used for postage.

The third condition was that the sheets must be attached to the postcards before
being offered for sale. 

The official connection gave the issue some legitimacy in the eyes of the
public and stamp
world so the printer went ahead and produced these quite attractive little
miniature sheets. At that stage the printer set about marketing his rather
unusual Olympic Games souvenir item and he immediately ran into a brickwall of
disinterest. None of the dealers he approached wanted to have anything to do
with such an item. 

Eventually he "sold" the sheetlets (loose, i.e not affixed to the cards as
stipulated) to a well-known philatelic forger and con artist, who never paid for
them, and made little out of the deal himself - he sold about 10,000 of them in
lots of various sizes, probably netting a nickel or so each.

The remaining 40,000 remain unaccounted for.