Category: New Zealand

The story of Chinese New Year starts with Jade Emperor, who created the Zodiac calendar, a 12 -year cycle to help track the passage of time. The Rabbit was chosen to represent the fourth year in the Zodiac after it came fourth in the Jade Emperor’s great race. Chinese believe that the Zodiac and the animal years in which people are born have a tremendous influence on their lives and personalities. Despite the rabbit coming fourth in the Jade Emperor’s great race, being a Rabbit is considered fortunate.

The Year of the Rabbit will be commemorated with stamps and collectables in December ahead of the New Year in 2023.

Stamps

The design of the 2023 Year of the Rabbit stamps is inspired by the style of the Chinese nianhua poster, which traditionally show gods, animals and babies enacting Chinese folklore. The style of the posters can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty when woodblock printing was popularised.

The stamps, created by Wellington designer Ying-Min Chu, are intended to evoke a sense of nostalgia while also looking forward to a prosperous year ahead. This stamp issue includes a miniature sheet, first day covers and a presentation pack.

Antarctic sea ice is a key element in the global climate system. Its growth each winter creates cold, deep ocean conditions that help sustain Antarctica’s ice sheets, it modifies storms in the Southern Hemisphere, and it affects the rate of global warming.

The images featured in this series of Ross Dependency stamps represent the work of New Zealand’s leading Antarctic sea ice scientists who are conducting ground-breaking research in McMurdo Sound, investigating how the changing climate may impact the fragile sea ice balance in Antarctica. 

This issue includes four stamps, a stamp first day cover, a miniature sheet, a miniature sheet first day cover, a presentation pack and a Limited Edition, and the stamps issue on 2 November.

In celebration of all the women scientists in Aotearoa New Zealand, this stamp issue highlights the remarkable work of four trailblazing women Mākereti Papakura, Lucy Moore, Joan Wiffen and Beatrice Hill Tinsley achieved in the scientific fields of ethnography, botany, palaeontology and cosmology in the 20th century. 

Born between 1873 and 1941, the women featured on these stamps achieved in the face of institutional and societal structures that often made things difficult for women. 

Mākereti Papakura drew on her whānau and consulted hapū elders to collate years of letters, notebooks and sketches that provided insights into the lives of Māori women, who were often ignored or undervalued by men writing about Māori society. New Zealand’s main science employer, the DSIR, did not employ any women as scientists until the late 1930s, when Lucy Moore was finally able to secure permanent work more than 10 years after her graduation. 

Many other women worked as unpaid research assistants to their scientist fathers or husbands, and their contributions were often not acknowledged. Even in the 1980s, when she made most of her discoveries, Joan Wiffen had trouble being taken seriously by the country’s almost exclusively male geology workforce. When Beatrice Hill Tinsley followed her husband to the United States, she shouldered the bulk of the housework and childcare responsibilities, and nepotism rules prevented her getting a job at the same university as him. 

With lives that spanned the course of the 20th century, these women scientists were trailblazers, setting out on careers of discovery and achievement in spite of the barriers they faced.

Date of issue: 2 November 2022