Getting mail in the early days

Oops! I have been ankle-deep but head-down in Australian history this month, Never mind why just now, but all will be revealed when the time is right, at the appropriate juncture. Here's a sample of this month's work:

How mail was delivered in 1810

In the earliest days of each colony, letters and packages were held for collection at the Post Office, and people went to collect their mail. Advertisements were lodged to indicate unclaimed mail, and while writing the previous chapter, this practice allowed me to find where Blandowski was expected to be in 1851. The introduction of postal deliveries to homes and businesses seems to be one of those improvements that nobody saw fit to mention, but in 1828, The Monitor suggested that “Post carriers” travelling along country roads could distribute “those letters &c. along the road, which are addressed to parties thereon…”

In 1831, the Australian offered a similar idea, but it was now more advanced, involving a “…POST-BOY, whose task it should be to ride through his proper district—call at the settlers’ farms, and deliver his letters, newspapers, and so forth correctly, as addressed at least once, and if requisite twice or three times a week.” Then the NSW Post Office Act of 1835 makes a passing reference that may be relevant:

That it shall and may be lawful for the said Governor to fix the Rates and sums of money to be demanded by the said Postmaster-General, and Postmasters respectively, and their Assistants, for receiving, despatching, and delivering of letters and packets…
— The Sydney Monitor, 15 July 1835, 4,.

By 1836, deliveries to some homes must have been happening, because the Sydney Herald urged that Post-office carriers be sent to “…the southern boundary of the town of Sydney, for the convenience of the inhabitants of what is now called Parramatta-street”. In 1845, deliveries were clearly happening, but citizens were now pestering the delivery men in the street, wanting their letters, and the authorities stepped in:

Post Office Regulations—In consequence of the very great delay and inconvenience experienced at the post-office by the practice of parties impatient to receive their letters, waylaying and stopping the postmen in the street for that purpose, the Postmaster-General has issued an order that any letter carrier who delivers a letter in the street shall be dismissed. The same objectionable practice had gained ground in England to such an extent, that Lord Lonsdale issued a similar order to prevent frauds.
— The Sentinel (Sydney), 19 October 1845, 2.

Before the gold rush, Thomas M’Combie reported that Melbourne’s post office was a small cottage, with two apartments—the back being used for newspapers, the front for letters and one man. He operated through a small open window, and had a neat scam running, one which still operates to this day in Morocco. It’s called “no change”.

It was a remarkable fact that he never had any change. If the postage upon a letter was but threepence, and the owner had no coin smaller than half-a-crown, he must hand it over, or, hard fate! go without the much-desired and anxiously-looked-for letter from “home.”
— Thomas M’Combie, Australian Sketches, 110 – 11.

(When we found the same scam being operated in Morocco, just a few years back, it ended when we set the hotel barman up, with photos, and told him the whole thing would go on the internet, so the hotel lost business, and he lost his job.)

In Melbourne, When a mail delivery arrived, this man emptied the whole of the newspapers in the interior room, and all applicants were politely ushered in there, and requested to help themselves to their own. M’Combie said he often spent a complete day tumbling over some thousands of newspapers, in search of his property. By 1853, the Post Office gave employment to hundreds of individuals, but it still failed to meet the requirements of the colony.

Even in the 1850s, the Post Office in Melbourne was a shambles, as William Kelly discovered. He called the building “a wretched wooden hovel, awkwardly propped up in a filthy quagmire”, surmounted by an eccentric clock.

There were two approaches for inquiry, railed off at the immediate approach to the delivering apertures; but as the letters of the alphabet were impartially divided in twain and assigned to each, it followed, as a matter of course, that the aperture to which such unpopular letters as Q, U, V, X, Y, and Z were allotted would be comparatively idle, while the other would be crowded with a column of unintermitting applicants. I belonged to the popular aperture, and found that the transit of a couple of hours only brought me within the railing, when, weary and disgusted, I would have raised the siege, only that I was unwilling to subject myself to the ordeal of the jeering laugh to which every tired-out “lime-juicer,” as we new chums were called, was treated on his abdication.
— William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858, vol 1, 44 – 5.

Having gone to the goldfields, Kelly visited the Ballarat Post Office in 1853. He found it a moderate-sized log cabin, most of which was devoted to general business “…and the person who wanted an ounce of tobacco was attended to before the man in quest of letters.” The whole exterior was papered over with quaintly-worded and ingeniously-spelled hand-scribed advertisements, and he quoted some:

If this should meet the eye of John Tims he will hear of his shipmate at Pennyweight Flat, next tent to the tub and cradle.

James dakin notyces the publik agin thrustin his wife.

Patt Flynn calls on biddy to return to the tint forninst the cross roads.

Ten pounds reward for my black mare. No questions asked nor ideas insinuated. [There was no address.]

For sale, several householt an kulenary articles, as also a numerous frackshun of odds an ends, at the Tent oppsite the Frenchman’s store at the Ureka.

The rule, Kelly deduced was that if you could find a vacant space you were at liberty to occupy it; but “woe betide you if caught either in pulling off or overriding a previously posted notice, which, under pick-and-shovel law, were allowed to remain until they fell off in scabs, like a poor man’s plaister.” He paid a shilling at the post-office counter for a
sheet of paper and liberty to write a line to my friend, and an advertisement,

…for which I fortunately found a vacancy; but after dropping my note in the box, and in the act of wafering up my notice, a young man who read it over my shoulder said “he thought he knew my friend and party, and if I would accompany him to Prince Regent’s Gully, he would take me to them.”

We know of Friedrich Gerstäcker’s mail cart torture, travelling from Sydney to Albury, but what of the mail, and the suffering mail carter, after he climbed out in Albury, in pre-Gold Rush days? The mail itself went on to Melbourne, about two hundred miles distant from the place, from which there was a connection once a week with Adelaide, “but not through the wilderness of the Murray Scrub, but along the more cultivated, or at least better settled districts of the sea-coast.”

At the end of the century though, the movement of rural mails was still a little ad hoc, as novelist Miles Franklin shows in the excerpt below from My Brilliant Career. This is fiction, but was closely based on her own experience.

A bush mailman, 1850s. (S. T. Gill)

In pursuance of his duty a government mail-contractor passed Caddagat every Monday, dropping the Bossier mail as he went. On Thursday we also got the post, but had to depend partly on our own exertions.

A selector at Dogtrap, on the Wyambeet run, at a point of the compass ten miles down the road from Caddagat, kept a hooded van. Every Thursday he ran this to and from Gool-Gool for the purpose of taking to market vegetables and other farm produce. He also took parcels and passengers, both ways, if called upon to do so. Caddagat and Five-Bob gave him a great deal of carrying, and he brought the mail for these and two or three other places.

It was one of my duties, or rather privileges, to ride thither on Thursday afternoon for the post, a leather bag slung round my shoulders for the purpose. I always had a splendid mount, and the weather being beautifully hot, it was a jaunt which I never failed to enjoy.
— Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, ch 17.

Sydney post boys, 1881,

But how did Australia get its mail from overseas? Anthony Trollope, aside from being a novelist, introduced the British pillar-box for mailing letters, so he cared. Some news came from the USA, mostly reaching Sydney, but the English mail touched first at King George’s Sound (Albany), then passing Adelaide, South Australian mail went into a branch boat to be taken ashore, while the rest of the mail went on to Melbourne. As Adelaide got the branch boat sooner, important news came from Adelaide by telegraph.