What Can Be Done: Western Australia is one of the more interesting of the Australian States (and indeed of the entire British Commonwealth) to collect. The reason is that the designs are completely different from any other British colonial issues, the stamps incorporating the Swan of Western Australia. Most countries, following the lead of Great Britain, pictured their first monarch on their first stamps (the United States pictured our first Postmaster general Benjamin Franklin on our first stamp and our first President on our second). But, more popular with collectors, who have had their fill of people on stamps, were the countries like Canada (which pictured a Beaver), Japan (which pictured dragons) and Western Australia and their swans. Like most of the other Australian States, Western Australia has many perf varieties. One of the oddities of the entire British area is that perf varieties get far more attention from British specialists than the stamps of other areas get from their specialists. Just about every other early Hungarian stamp is a perf variety and most have no Scott listing and these varieties are only attended to by the most ardent specialists. But perf varieties are very important to the philately of all the Australian states and especially Western Australia.
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Specialty Catalogs: Most US collectors use the Scott catalog for collecting Western Australia and most British collectors use the Stanley Gibbons catalog. Gibbons prices tend to be higher. But for collectors, the prices they pay tend to be the same whether the selling dealer is using Scott or Gibbons. Gibbons dealers just give higher discounts from the catalog value.
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Specialty Albums: Your best bet, if you collect only Western Australia, is to make your own album pages or down load preprinted pages from the web. Western Australia is sold only as part of the Scott or lighthouse Australia and states albums and so, if you collect only Western Australia, you are buying far more of the album than you need.
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Availability Of Material: Western Australia has an avid body of collectors and dealers and material is, for the most part, readily available.
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Expense: Western Australia is very reasonably priced after you get past the first couple of imperf and rouletted issues. Again, as with most nineteenth century stamps, if you accept small faults, you can get the price you pay down to 10-15% of catalog.
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Overall grade:B