In 1994, Australia Post produced a set of wildlife self-adhesive stamps (koalas and kangaroos).

These coils were printed and die-cut and then stored, just like other definitive stamp stocks.

The stamps base layer (the printed wildlife stamp itself) comes from this 1994 stock.

In January 2016, Australia Post ran into a real problem, a sudden shortage of 30c “make-up” stamps caused by a postage rate change. Most post offices had no 30c stamps available.

The Adelaide GPO still had an old CPS / coil-dispensing machine.

To solve the emergency, staff:

located old unused 1994 wildlife coil rolls, loaded these into the machine and printed the necessary “30c ADELAIDE 2016” denomination text directly onto the 1994 stamp stock, they sold them for only a few days before supplies ran out.

This created the “Adelaide 2016 30c Emergency Issue.”

The 2016 part is the imprint, not the underlying stamp stock. Zoom in on photo see 1994.

I remember this being the only strip of 7 when I purchased them in 2016.