Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows some of the history of Travelling Post Offices (TPOs), which were mobile post offices on trains. It opens with colour footage of manual mail sorting in a conventional mail centre in the 1980s. Historical photographs are then shown, accompanied by a voice-over explaining that the mid-19th-century demand for speedy communication in New South Wales led to steam trains carrying mail, and to mail being sorted in transit. The clip concludes with mailbags being taken by truck to a TPO, while the narrator says that TPOs have now been superseded by road and air transport.

Educational value points

• The clip focuses on the history of Australian Travelling Post Offices, which facilitated mail services to country areas and other isolated communities. Mail for destinations along particular railway lines was put on TPOs to be sorted in transit.

• The commentary explores the relationship between the railways and the postal service, and also examines the demand for 'mobile post offices to service the needs of the expanding outback’. The first railway line in Australia opened in 1854 between Melbourne and Sandridge (Port Melbourne) in Victoria, and the first railway line in NSW, which ran between Sydney and Parramatta, was completed in 1855. TPOs followed within 15 years. They were first attached to trains in Victoria in 1865 and in NSW in 1870.

• Before telegrams, telephones, email or SMS, the post was the only way in which people could communicate and conduct business transactions across long distances. The importance of the postal service in the 19th century (known then as the Royal Mail) and the prestige of the Postmaster-General’s Department, which administered the postal services, are revealed in the clip through images of the fine architecture of post offices built in country towns and the smart uniforms of postal staff.

• Sorting mail quickly and accurately to ensure speedy delivery has always been important. The opening scene of the clip shows that, in the 1980s, mail at large postal centres was processed manually by a large number of people. By the early years of the 21st century, mail processing in Australia was almost totally automated, utilising barcoding and conveyor tray technology, and employing far fewer people.

• During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a common means of postal transport was the horse-drawn coach, as illustrated by photographs in the clip. Coaches often worked in conjunction with rail transport, collecting mail for outlying areas from the nearest railhead. In 1863 the US-owned coach company Cobb and Co became the official mail carrier within NSW and Victoria, and by 1866 Cobb and Co coaches were also carrying mail in Queensland. The last time the Royal Mail was carried by a Cobb and Co coach was in western Queensland in 1924.

• The commentary describes how, as pioneers and settlers opened up the continent, services 'struggled to keep pace’, particularly communications services such as the post. The expansion of settlers into more remote areas in the 1840s stimulated mail services considerably, and archival photographs show that mail began being transported by motorised vehicles, including motorcycles, cars and trucks. Mail trucks replaced packhorses in outback Australia early in the 20th century; for example, in Queensland a Royal Mail truck service was instituted at Isisford, 1,160 km from Brisbane, as early as 1910. Ultimately, improvements in the reliability of motor transport and the expansion of the network of sealed roads spelled the end of the TPOs.

• The film Australia Post – The Last of the TPOs was made in 1985 for the NSW Public Relations Office of Australia Post to commemorate the final day of operation of the last TPO. Other states had closed down their TPOs some time earlier. No historical footage of TPOs in NSW has been found, so Tim Parsons, the director of the documentary, used photographs filed in the National Archives of the early years of the post in Australia. To add visual interest, the photographs are presented as turning pages in a photograph album.