[Editor: This untitled article, regarding the Kangaroo and Map stamps, was published in the “News of the day” section in The Age (Melbourne, Vic.), 23 April 1913.]
[From Greek literature to the new Australian postage stamp]
From Greek literature to the new Australian postage stamp is a fairly wide step, but Dr. Leeper achieved it with scarcely an effort in his lecture at the Independent Hall last night.
He had been speaking of classical ideas of beauty, making special reference to those obtaining in the age of Pericles. A passing reference to the Eight Hours statue, which he thought singularly unbeautiful, and to the Boer war memorial, which he considered hideous, brought the lecturer to a comparison between classical forms of art and those obtaining to-day.
“What,” he asked suddenly, “would an Athenian citizen have thought of the kangaroo stamp?” He confessed that, for his own part, he experienced a “feeling of humiliation” every time he fixed one on.
The lecturer did not say whether, as a result of his attitude to the postage stamp, he had curtailed his correspondence, or whether he now had the affixing process performed for him by someone else.
Before leaving the subject of this latest Australian work of art, Dr. Leeper inquired of the audience, “What would Pericles have thought of it?” As no one seemed able to supply the answer, Dr. Leeper supplied it himself. “I think,” he remarked, “it would have killed him.”
Source:
The Age (Melbourne, Vic.), 23 April 1913, p. 8 (column 6)
Also published in:
The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA), 25 April 1913, p. 8 (“General News” section, see item entitled: The kangaroo postage stamp)
The Daily Telegraph (Launceston, Tas.), 26 April 1913, p. 6 (entitled: The “kangaroo” stamp)
Darling Downs Gazette (Toowoomba, Qld.), 28 April 1913, p. 4 (entitled: Pericles and the stamp)
Editor’s notes:
Leeper = Alexander Leeper (1848-1934), academic, principal of Trinity College (a residential college of the University of Melbourne, Vic.); he was born in Dublin (Ireland) in 1848, came to Australia in 1871 for a brief period, returned to Britain, then came back to Australia in 1874, and died in South Yarra in 1934
See: 1) J. R. Poynter, “Leeper, Alexander (1848–1934)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography
2) “Alexander Leeper”, Wikipedia
[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]
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