Help building the largest human-edited directory of the web Suggest URL - Open Directory Project - Become an editor

directopedia.org uses links and structure from dmoz Open Directory Project.
The contents has been generating using technology developed by scientec.

This article discusses the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea. For other uses of the name, see New Britain (disambiguation).

New Britain, the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, has Rabaul as its principal city.

For administrative purposes, New Britain comprises two provinces:

1. East New Britain with headquarters in Rabaul
2. West New Britain with headquarters in Kimbe

William Dampier became the first known European to visit New Britain on February 27, 1700: he dubbed the island with the Latin name Nova Britannia. The German colonial administration which ruled the area from 1884 to 1914 called the island Neu-Pommern ("New Pomerania").

On 11 September 1914, Neu-Pommern became the site of one of the early battles of World War I, when Australian forces landed on the island. At that time, Neu-Pommern formed part of German New Guinea. Previous to this, some armed engagements had taken place in Africa. Fighting had started in Europe with the Battle of Cer on 12 August 1914.

Postage stamps

When the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force occupied German New Guinea in 1914, it met the need for postage stamps by overprinting existing stocks of the (unwatermarked) German New Guinea and Marshall Islands stamps with "G.R.I" (short for Georgius Rex Imperator, referring to the current British King George V. Values ranged from one pence to five shillings, and roughly corresponded with the values of the original stamps expressed in pfennigs: 1d on 3pf and 5pf stamps, 2d on 10pf and 20pf, and so forth.

The Australians issued a first setting of the overprint on 17 October 1914, followed by a second setting (with slightly different spacing) on 16 December. In all, the produced some 50 distinct stamps.

In addition, Australian postal authorities pressed registration labels into service as 3d stamps, overprinted in the same way as the others. Labels of the Friedrich Wilhelmshaven, Herbertshohe, Kawieng, Kieta, Manus, and Rabaul post offices became overprinted in this manner.

In 1915 the Australians superseded these improvised stamps of New Britain with stamps of the "North West Pacific Islands".

Because of the short period of use of the New Britain issues, they occur quite rarely, and command high prices; the most common denominations cost at least $15 US apiece, and the five-shilling overprints fetch prices of over $10,000 on the rare occasions when they come up for sale. In addition, the overprinting process produced a number of errors, and these also command high prices.

References

• Australian War Memorial, Operations against German Pacific territories, 06 August 1914 - 06 November 1914.

This article is based on the article "New Britain" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.