Enveloping the Past: Sport Stamps, Visuality and Museums

Postage stamps are a significant but largely overlooked item of visual culture. This article examines how sports stamps represent the past and the ways that museums package the sporting past through philatelic exhibitions. Using the concept of the historical 'story space', we focus on the textual representation of cricket stamps and an associated philatelic exhibition in Australia. These representations of the past will be examined through a combination of both semiotic theory and the 'new museology'. As case studies, we focus on three individual cricket stamps and the depiction of these and other stamps in an associated philatelic exhibition: 'A Summer of Cricket: An Exhibition of Art, Stamps and Stories' curated by the Post Master Gallery, Australia's national philatelic museum, in 2005-6. Via such exhibitions, stamps extend beyond their initial utilitarian purpose and become important representations of the sporting past. To critique how this is achieved, this article asks: How do stamps semiotically represent cricket history? How did the gallery curate an exhibition based around cricket stamps? What curatorial philosophies and approaches provided a particular logic of representation and plausible coherence for visitors? And what narratives were generated by exhibiting stamps in a broader context of the relationship between cricket and national identity? Through these questions, this article reflects on the nexus of stamps and museums in visually narrating sports history.