Postage Stamps and Postal History of Norfolk Island - Before 1947

Before 1947

The formal postal history of Norfolk began with the second penal settlement organised on the island between 1824 and 1855. The first post office opened in 1832.

The first postage stamps used there were sent by Van Diemen's Land, the colony administratively responsible for the settlement. Decided late 1853, the first stamps figuring Queen Victoria, worth sixteen pounds, travelled on the Lady Franklin. Part of them were lost when the prisoners aboard the ship mutinied and flew away. The second packet of stamps arrived finally to Norfolk and they were used between July 1854 and May 1855, when the penal colony was closed and all people evacuated. The stamps used in Norfolk can be distinguished by the number marked by the cancellation: "72".

Even if the island was repopulated in 1856 by migrants from the Pitcairn Islands, authorized by the United Kingdom, Norfolk received a postal service and postage stamps not before 1877. The British authorities asked New South Wales to provided them to Norfolk. However, the stamp stock was not regularly reconstituted until 1898, and, with no postage stamp, the "NORFOLK ISLAND" cancel stamp sent in 1892 was not used until 1898.

With the constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, the stamps of Australia replaced those of New South Wales in 1913.