by The last part of the former Dutch East Indies to be “lost” (as many older Dutch people thought at the time) was Dutch/Netherlands New Guinea (NNG), the western half of the island of New Guinea, in 1962. From October 1962 the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) took over control, after which in May 1963 power for governing the area was transferred to Indonesia. During the short period of UNTEA control the Netherlands New Guinea stamps were overprinted with “UNTEA”. Overprinting was also done for NNG postal cards.
The postal cards shown here are both from the May 1957 series produced for NNG. In the Geuzendam catalogue (8th edition) the original version of these cards is listed as G2 on page 244, while the overprinted version is shown on page 249. The stamp imprint/indices shows the 7 cents Juliana stamp. The 1962-1963 overprinting comes in 3 forms. Discussing the overprints is not the story I’d like to tell in this article. What is interesting about these postal cards is something else: their usage.
As a collector of UNTEA, this article is very interesting to me. These postcards were in use for a very short time, so this promotion by the radio station explains where there are so many of this postcards available to the stamp market that were used for sending in song requests to the radio station.