Australian
Screen

Clip description

This clip talks about how the volume of mail the Australian Post Office is handling per year has resulted in the need for a new centralised mail exchange. It explains how the Redfern Mail Exchange will function as a centralised sorting point for all New South Wales mail.

Curator’s notes

This is the first segment of the film, opening with shots of the multiple posting boxes at the Sydney GPO. As is the case today, letters could be posted in street located boxes, but letters posted at a post office were guaranteed speedier delivery. The first step in the mail sorting process took place at the post office. Those posting letters at a post office were required to place their mail in the destination appropriate box. While most suburban and regional post offices offered three or four posting boxes, the capital city GPOs offered an array of boxes, labelled according to state, urban and rural destinations. Today electronic sorting obviates this requirement, and when it opened in 1965, the Redfern Mail Exchange was at the vanguard of electronic sorting.

As the clip goes on to illustrate, Redfern was to be the flagship for this new method of handling the country’s increasing volume of mail, as well as a beacon of postal modernisation and technological advancement. It was typical of the national propensity for large-scale infrastructure projects at the time. Like all of these projects, Redfern utilised technological innovations, many devised and refined during the Second World War, to cater to the growing size and anticipated demands of Australia’s postwar population.