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Clip description
This clip summarises the history and development of the actual delivery of mail items to their recipients, beginning with the first official delivery of mail to the colony of New South Wales and ending with the PMG’s acquisition of a fleet of motorcycles.
Curator’s notes
1809 is recognised as the date of Australia’s first official mail delivery. Although mail had been travelling to and from England, and messages and mail items were passed between individuals within the New South Wales colony, it wasn’t until 1809 that ex-convict Isaac Nichols was made the colony’s first Postmaster. He operated from his home in Circular Quay (on the corner of what is now George Street), and the building was regarded as Australia’s first post office.
In 1828 Australia’s first postman commenced deliveries in Sydney. The first mail contracts were issued and mail was transported by coach or on horseback from Sydney to the first seven country post offices – Penrith, Parramatta, Liverpool, Windsor, Campbelltown, Newcastle and Bathurst. Tom Cambridge, of Windsor, is recognised as one of Australia’s first posties. He delivered mail three times a week from Windsor to Richmond. In his 1835 portrait, shown in the clip, he wears the postmen’s black top hat. Postmen’s uniforms of red coats and black top hats were issued in 1831 – the same year that Sydney’s first street posting boxes were installed.
The clip also shows an illustration of the 1850s Cobb and Co ‘Yankee’ style coach, made in Australia but adapted from the American Concord design. Cobb and Co was set up in Melbourne in 1853, with the original intention of servicing the Victorian goldfields. It quickly developed into a much larger concern, opening up new transport routes and delivering mail, as well as gold and passengers throughout the country. Its role in the pastoral development of inland Australia was extremely significant. At its peak, Cobb and Co’s network of tracks extended further than those of any other coach system in the world. Many a tiny outback town came into existence as a staging post on a Cobb and Co run. Passengers would disembark to refresh themselves while the horses were exchanged for a fresh team, kept in the stables of the town’s hotel or coaching inn – which was often named the Royal Mail or even Cobb and Co Hotel. The final Cobb and Co road mail service was on the Yuleba-Surat run in western Queensland in 1924.
The last evolutionary moment leading up to the motorbike postie is the pushbike postie. This clip depicts the pushbike postie as slow and exhausted (and in desperate need of motorised transport). But many Australians who grew up in the suburbs during any period predating 1970 will remember a friendly (and very fit) postman, delivering letters then blowing his whistle (a practice which ended in the 1980s) to notify the resident that there’s mail.
