Bruce Henderson (philatelist)
New Zealand anarchist and philatelist
Bruce Ronald Henderson, also known as Bruce Grenville and Martin Renwick (born 1950), is a New Zealand anarchist, hoaxer and producer of artistamps. He is particularly known for the creation of the fictional Sultanate of Occussi-Ambeno.
Early life
Bruce Henderson was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1950.
Sultanate of Occussi-Ambeno
In the 1970s and 1980s he gained notoriety for a hoax involving the fabrication of the utopian Sultanate State of Occussi-Ambeno, located as an exclave on the Island of Timor at Oecusse, with himself as the self-proclaimed Sultan. Stamps were produced for the "Sultanate". The Sultanate was the subject of a documentary film made by Barry Thomas with filming done in New Zealand and Australia. Henderson wrote a 200 page history of the utopian state with its own airline "Swift Air," a fleet of blimps as there were no roads, cars or pollution.
Doctor Who
In January 1999, he came to notice for the discovery of the long missing first episode of the 1965 Doctor Who story The Crusade, discovered in a garage sale in Napier. After loaning the episode to the BBC for restoration, Henderson auctioned the film print on eBay.
Selected publications
"Voyages to Imaginary Countries" in Artistamps Francobolli D'Artista, James Warren Felter (Ed.), AAA Edizioni, Bertiolo, Italy, 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bruce Henderson (philatelist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.