One of the many great offerings by Douglas Stewart Fine Books, Melbourne, at the revived Sydney Rare Book Fair to be held at the weekend will be the above improvised postcard , made on Active Service on Gallipoli from a souvenired Ottoman Turkish soap packet , passed by the censor . Sale price : $1500.
It was sent in June l915 by" Arthur" to aunt Ada , Mrs S. S. Clarke , in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby .
In it he says he received her letters and a parcel , that they were under fire but well , he had not been able to find out about a person called Robert .
The bookshop supplied further research about the offering and other wartime postcards, which follows.
While the use of improvised postcards by Anzac soldiers on Gallipoli is well attested – the earliest recorded example is dated 29 May and the latest, 3 August 1915 – it is estimated that only 25 made and sent by New Zealanders have survived.
Even more significant, however, is the fact that the present example is one of only two known instances of a postcard being created from Turkish packaging “captured” on Gallipoli. (Note: the other such example, previously in the esteemed postal history collections of Gordon Darge and Gary Diffen, was apparently made from the other half of the same soap packet).
The New Zealand Expeditionary Force initially comprised a single infantry brigade of around 4000 men. Each of New Zealand’s four military districts – Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury and Otago – contributed a battalion of 1000 men to the brigade, which served in the Gallipoli campaign between April and December 1915. On Gallipoli the New Zealand infantry were frequently deployed to attack Turkish trenches, usually over steep and exposed ground.
Although the sender of this card identifies himself simply as “Arthur”, we do at least know that he was the nephew of Mrs S. S. Clarke of Ponsonby, Auckland. This woman was almost certainly the widow of Stephen S. Clarke, who for years had run a business retailing perambulators on Karangahape Road, in the adjoining suburb of Newton.
However, if Mrs Clarke was Arthur’s maternal aunt then obviously he would not share the same surname; furthermore, even though he went by the name Arthur it is possible that this was his middle name, not his first. Ironically, a Lance Corporal Arthur Clarke of the Otago Infantry Battalion was killed on 25 April 1915, the day of the first Gallipoli landings.
The bookshop pointed out an intriguing aspect- the initials LHR -Light Horse Regiment - on the top left corner of the postcard . It was not clear what the sender , or the postcard itself had with the Australian Light Horse .
Anothe Douglas Stewart listing for the book fair ,described as an utmost rarity , is the watercolour , shown below, from Dumont d' Urville's 1826 -29 expedition to the South Seas in the corvette Astrolabe. It is the work of the official voyage artist, the young Louis - Auguste de Sainson (1800-1874 } which depicts him in 1827 with fellow companions in the rainforests of Carteret Harbour, New Ireland , priced at $235,000.
