And so, for example, at this weekend's Canberra Stampshow 2014, visitors will see a picture posted on April 15, 1915, by Australian soldier Captain Betts, from Egypt home to his mother and his wife in Streaky Bay, South Australia. On horseback and flanked by two other horsemen, he is juxtaposed with two of the world's top tourist attractions.

He writes home that ''Here you see me with a veterinary officer on either side. The sphinx shows up well. You can see where the red paint of his face has become streaky. The pyramid of Cheops shows up behind the Sphinx.''

This ''tourist'', bless him, was only one day, two perhaps, from sailing away to Lemnos and then on to Gallipoli.

Almost all of the men who went on to Gallipoli did so after a sojourn in Egypt (where they often behaved badly towards the locals, the first foreigners they'd ever known). One of the striking artefacts of the Stampshow is this printed-in-Cairo circa-1915 postcard ''Australian horsemanship in Cairo.'' The Australian horseman is riding an overworked local donkey while its swarthy, raggle-taggle local owner, his clothing patched, follows on.

Only some of the covers (envelopes) and postcards in the big show (5500 pages of items, worth several million dollars, attracting hosts of exhibitors, collectors and dealers) relate to the Great War but there is a partial Great War and Gallipoli theme this year. A busy and a little frazzled Darryl Fuller of the Philatelic Society of Canberra, racing against time to lead the setting up of the big show at the Canberra Hellenic Club, explained to us that the society does try to have a theme for each annual show and the centenary of the Great War is looming.

And so there is a section of the show all about the letters and postcards written and sent by Australians in training, in transit, in Egypt and then on Gallipoli (where, from the very first, six field post offices were set up on the beaches) and in the hospitals Gallipoli's wounded were delivered to.

This is poignant material. The men and women who wrote and sent these communications lived in dramatic times and saw terrible things. Many authors were to die at war. Their writings about their experiences are a kind of living history (real flesh and blood fingers held the pens and pencils that wrote the words). Indeed Fuller says that we should think of the exhibits not just as postal history (in fact, in spite of the exhibitions's name, stamps are the least conspicuous items in it) but as ''social history''.

Shortly after the Lone Pine horrors on Gallipoli, a nursing sister wrote home from the General Hospital in Alexandria on postcards of views of Alexandria: ''Dear Jack, I did mean to send a letter earlier this week but I have really been too awfully busy for anything.

''We have had a terrible week of it. Hundreds and hundreds of wounded every day. Poor chaps they have had a time of it … If you wouldn't mind sending me a new pair of feet I should be awfully glad. Mine are too tired for anything. Love to all, Kath.''

The number of postcards in the Great War/Gallipoli part of the show will surprise the philatelically naive. In our own times we've come to think of the postcard as a ''Wish you were here'' artefact offering a flatteringly pretty pic of where the sender is. But this exhibition bristles with contemporary postcards of, say, the unremarkable-looking places on Gallipoli where the Australians landed, and of the plain and burly troopships in which the men beetled away from Australia and off to war.

But by then, Fuller explained to us, the postcard, cheaper than a letter and with a power to portray places and things, was in its heyday.

But there's much, much more to the show than the Great War materials.

There's frivolity, too. So for example there are some early 20th century love and courtship postcards. One of the stars of this group, made in Philadelphia in 1907 and made up of several joined postcards shows a young man and a gorgeous damsel at a beach. The damsel is in a modest bathing suit and sitting on a rock and the smitten young man, although quite some way away from her on the other side of the beach, is getting a good close look at her by virtue of his normal-sized face and head being attached to a neck three times as long as a giraffe's. His message printed on the card is:

This might suggest

to some, you know,

That I was ill, but

that's not so.

It merely gives a

hint to you

Of a certain thing

I'm forced to do

By endeavouring

with all my might

To get acquainted with a peach

Who sits all day upon the beach.

■ The Philatelic Society of Canberra's Canberra Stampshow 2014 is at the Hellenic Club, Woden, March 14-16.