Discovering Australia’s Historical Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Boxes

By Robert Crofts and Sandra Crofts

The purpose of this book is to allow interested community members to gain an understanding of the historically important role postal services made to contemporary Australia. Specific attention is given to the appreciation of the beautiful architectural styles of the historically significant postal buildings and red pillar post boxes that are still available to be viewed. In a similar format to our first book ‘Discovering Australia’s historical milemarkers and boundary stones’, this book begins with a brief history of Australia’s postal services dating from the establishment of the first post office in 1809 up to the present day. Information on significant communication strategies such as the Cobb & Co. mail service and the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) are included. Information is provided on the biographies of some important contributors to the Australian postal services. The following chapters, organised state by state from Queensland to the Northern Territory, describe a sample of post offices and red pillar post boxes. Finally, some interesting postal items are described with references providing links for further reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jan 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669830771

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DISCOVERING AUSTRALIA’S

HISTORICAL POST OFFICES

AND RED PILLAR

POST BOXES

ROBERT AND SANDRA CROFTS

Copyright © 2023 by Robert and Sandra Crofts. 842017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval

system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either

are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and

any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is

entirely coincidental.

Xlibris

AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)

AU Local: 02 8310 8187 ([phone] from outside Australia)

www.xlibris.com.au

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912739

Rev. date: 01/16/2023

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the spirit of reconciliation, we would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. We extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

We would also like to acknowledge the numerous people and private organisations that gave their permission for images to be used in this publication. Thanks are given to the generosity of the postal managers that allowed us to photograph the post office façades. Thanks, are also given to the organisations who gave permission to photograph the red pillar post boxes that stand in private grounds. We thank these organisations for their continued care for these historically significant monuments to Australia’s postal history.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our ability to continue this project by travelling distances was severely hampered. Thanks are given to our friends and family who gave generously of their time to take photographs for us. Particular thanks are given to Glenys Hatch for her contribution to the photographs taken in Western Australia.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1A Brief History of Australian Postal Services

Chapter 2Important Contributors to Australian Postal Services

Chapter 3Brisbane Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Box

Chapter 4Queensland Rural Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 5Sydney Central Business District Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 6Sydney Metropolitan Post Offices

Chapter 7Sydney Metropolitan Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 8New South Wales Rural Post Offices

Chapter 9New South Wales Rural Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 10Melbourne Central Business District Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Box

Chapter 11Melbourne Metropolitan Post Offices

Chapter 12Melbourne Metropolitan Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 13Victorian Rural Post Offices

Chapter 14Victorian Rural Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 15Tasmania Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 16South Australia Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 17Western Australia Post Offices and Red Pillar Post Boxes

Chapter 18Northern Territory Post Offices and Post Boxes

Chapter 19Highest Post Boxes in Australia

Chapter 20Interesting Postal Items

References

INTRODUCTION

Communication in the form of verbal or written messages has always been a characteristic of human interaction. It is very interesting to note that complex communication to distant locations was only viable when that communication was personally carried by another person travelling away from the village or town where the message originated. Such as the situation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia. For thousands of years, message sticks were commonly used as a form of complex communication. Messages to elders were painted and inscribed on a stick, which was then transported by hand. The messenger, who had the responsibility to carry the message stick, was traditionally granted safe and protected travel through another nation’s territory (Message Stick 2020).

The delivery of one famous personal message is embedded within our modern Olympic running race, the marathon. According to legend, in 490 BC, Pheidippides ran from a battlefield near the town of Marathon to Sparta to announce the defeat of the Persians. The effort exerted in delivering the victory message as quickly as possible resulted in Pheidippides dropping dead as soon as he had delivered the message (The Athens Marathon 2020).

Postal services require human intervention to carry messages, either personally, using single horses, horse-driven coaches, trains, ships or planes. One famous form of personally delivering distant messages was the privately owned American Pony Express, which operated from 1860 to 1861. This form of mail used a relay service of horse-mounted riders that transported newspapers and mail across mainland USA. With the advent of the railways and electromagnetic telegraph lines, the service was bankrupted within eighteen months (Postal Service, United States 2008).

In England, a form of postal service existed during the reign of Edward III (1312–1377), with the first Master of the Posts being appointed around 1512. The concept of a Governmental-supported postal service dates from the reign of the English King Charles I, who opened the English Royal Mails to the public in 1635. This innovation created the possibility of long-distance communication to literate people of even moderate means.

Long Distance Communication without Personal Travel

The earliest known form of long distant communication, without the need for personal travel, was by use of visual smoke signals while the French innovation of using flags and semaphores was the beginning of conveying distant messages over land through relay stations. Interestingly, the first semaphore with flag signals in Australia was used at South Head on 10 February 1790 to announce the arrival of the ship Supply (Woollahra Library Local History Centre 2003). Semaphores were also adopted in Hobart from 1811 from Mt Nelson down to Battery Point to announce vessels entering the Derwent River (Tasman 2018). The first rapid long range communication system in Australia was established by Captain Charles O’Hara Booth, commandant of convicts at the Tasmanian convict site of Port Arthur in 1836. Under his jurisdiction, a network of nineteen semaphore stations covered the Tasman Peninsula, enabling messages to be sent to and from Hobart. Communication was established by running a flag up a tall pole and then adjusting the angle of six arms on the pole. The various positions of each movable arm could be manually manipulated to indicate any number between one and many thousands. Each number corresponded to a letter, word, phrase, or sentence recorded in a code book developed by Captain Booth. On a clear day, when only four intervening stations needed to be used, a message of twenty words could be sent from Port Arthur to Hobart and acknowledged in fifteen minutes. When a convict had escaped, a message could get to the guard post at Eaglehawk Neck within minutes. This form of communication remained in use until 1877 (Tasman 2018).

Morse Code

Morse code is named after Samuel Finley Breese Morse who held a patent for the invention of the single wire electromagnetic telegraph system in 1844 (McLachlan 2009). This method of high-speed international telecommunication used a standardised sequence of on-off tones, lights, or clicks as symbols to rapidly send textural information. Each symbol represented either a text character such as a letter or numeral and was represented by a unique sequence of dots and dashes. The duration of a dash was three times the duration of a dot. Each dot or dash was followed by a short silence, equal to the dot duration. The letters of a word were separated by a space equal to three dots, or one dash and the words were separated by a space equal to seven dots. To increase the speed of the communication, Morse code was designed so that the length of each character varied approximately inversely to its frequency of occurrence in English. Thus, the most common letter in English, the letter E, had the shortest code, which was a single dot. Interestingly, the final stage of this process required the human intervention of the telegraph messenger to personally deliver the message to the recipient’s home.

The Telephone

Although several others had developed methods of transmitting sound over long distances, Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent his electric telephone device and telephone system in 1875. Bell’s telephone involved having two membrane receivers being connected electrically. A sound wave that caused one membrane to vibrate would induce a voltage in the electromagnetic coil that would in turn cause the other membrane to vibrate. The device was tested on 3 June 1875 and despite no intelligible words being transmitted, sounds were heard at the receiving end. The first clear words received over the telephone were in March 1876. Alexander Graham Bell shouted over the telephone to his assistant Thomas Watson in the next room of his Boston laboratory, Mr Watson come here—I want to see you (Alfred 2011).

The purpose of this book is to allow interested community members to gain an understanding of the historically important role postal services made to contemporary Australia. Specific attention is given to the appreciation of the beautiful architectural styles of the historically significant postal buildings and red pillar post boxes that are still available to be viewed. In a similar format to our first book, Discovering Australia’s Historical Milemarkers and Boundary Stones, this book begins with a brief history of Australia’s postal services dating from the establishment of the first post office in 1809 up to the present day. Information on significant communication strategies such as the Cobb & Co. mail service and the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) are included. Information is provided on the biographies of some important contributors to the Australian postal services. The following chapters, organised state by state from Queensland to the Northern Territory, describe a sample of post offices and red pillar post boxes. Finally, some interesting postal items are described with references providing links for further reading.

CHAPTER 1

A Brief History of

Australian Postal Services

The concept of a Royal Mail service came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. The first inward correspondence to the new colony is recognised as a despatch sent by Governor Gidley King from Norfolk Island to Governor Arthur Phillip to inform him on the progress of the penal settlement established on Norfolk Island. This inward mail was carried by Lieutenant Ball aboard the HMS Supply and arrived in Port Jackson on 19 March 1788. Interestingly, the first outward correspondence from the colony in Port Jackson is recognised as the first despatch from Governor Arthur Phillip to the British Admiralty in London as well as a letter from French explorer La Perouse to the French Ambassador in London. This correspondence was carried by Lieutenant Shortland on his return journey to England aboard the first fleet vessel the Alexander. The Alexander, the Friendship and the Prince of Wales vessels all departed Port Jackson on 15 May 1788 (Delaney 2016).

Unofficial mail was usually sent to England after literate colonists had made arrangements with ships’ captains or their agents, who, for a fee, would agree to carry letters and then, on arrival in England, forward through the English or Irish posts. These arrangements were flexible and depended on the cooperative spirit of the people involved (Delaney 2016; Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment 2022). One of the earliest unofficial correspondences to England by a convict was written on 8 October 1792 by fifteen-year-old Mary Haydock, later Mary Reiby (State Library of NSW 2019). Sadly, correspondence with relatives in their homeland was usually a prohibitive activity for the mostly illiterate convict population.

The first official postal service in Australia was established in April 1809, when the Sydney merchant, emancipated convict Isaac Nichols was appointed by Lieutenant Governor Patterson as the first postmaster in the colony of New South Wales (NSW) (Delaney 2016). Initially, his role was limited to collecting mail from incoming ships’ captains and then passing it on to addressees for the set (and rather expensive) fee of a shilling for a letter and up to five shillings for a parcel. Nichols used his new two-storey home on the corner of George Street and Circular Quay as Sydney’s first post office and was allowed to keep all the postage he had collected (McLachlan 2009). Nichols’s appointment was ratified by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810 and he served as postmaster until his death in 1819, all the while maintaining his ship owning, agricultural and other official business activities (Rea 1971). His successor, George Panton’s home was not as conveniently located at Circular Quay, so he moved his postal service to Bent Street. Both Nichols and Panton ran the postal service as private concessionaires, keeping their profits for themselves.

In 1825, the Government, under the direction of Major General Sir Thomas Brisbane, assumed direct control of the postal service. The Colonial Legislative Council passed its first postal act and established a Postmaster General’s Department, which had previously been administered from Britain. The postmaster was now salaried and no longer a private entrepreneur. Although the postal service was now firmly in government hands, many of its functions, especially transport and delivery of letters and parcels, were contracted to private individuals and companies. This mixture of public and private continues as a characteristic of the Australian postal service. In 1830, the post office began to occupy the site of the present Sydney General Post Office (or GPO) in George Street. At the same time, the colony’s first letter carrier was appointed to deliver mail in Sydney. Letter carriers’ equipment included a handbell and a leather bag with two pockets: one for paid and another for unpaid letters.

Prepaid Postage and the Introduction

of the Red Pillar Post Box

Irishman James Raymond, Postmaster General, suggested the introduction of prepaid stamped sheets to be used as envelopes, based on a proposal developed by Rowland Hill in England (Australian Dictionary of Biography 2006). The embossed cover or prepaid envelope consisted of a sheet of paper bearing the government coat of arms on which a letter could be written, then folded to form an envelope (McLachlan 2009). The cost of these prepaid envelopes was 1s. 3d. a dozen. Governor Sir George Gipps approved this experiment in November 1838. Prior to this, the burden of postage was borne by the receiver of the mail.

The famous penny black, the world’s first prepaid adhesive stamp, was issued in London in 1840. After the failure of the prepaid letters of 1838, this innovation took a while to gain reacceptance in NSW, whose first stamps were not issued until 1 January 1850. Victorian stamps were issued as soon as the new colony was proclaimed in the following year. Stamps meant the introduction of compulsory prepayment, simplifying the postal delivery service.

The use of prepaid adhesive postage stamps as well as the roadside pillar boxes meant there was no need to visit the post office to send a letter (Heritage Council of Western Australia 2018). France and Belgium had established street letter receivers in 1854. By 1855, London had installed its first six pillar post boxes (Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village 2015). The design adopted in Australia by Thomas William Levinge of the NSW Postmaster General’s Department, followed the French Post Office design of a hollow cast iron cylinder of about two foot in diameter and five feet, three inches in height. Within a few inches of the top of the cylinder are three slots, which are protected from the weather by pivoted iron lids. When the letter has been inserted, the lid falls over the slot. At the base of the cylinder is placed the door through which the letters are taken by the postal runner and conveyed to the local post office.

In 1855, the PMG called tenders for the supply of letter receivers in Sydney. As a result of the tenders called, thirteen cast iron letter boxes were installed at £14. 10s. each. They featured a decorative finial of a stylised waratah and acanthus leaves with a gold-coloured flower bud on the dome. The body and base may have the same waratah leaf pattern. The middle section usually has in gold-coloured lettering ‘POST OFFICE LETTER BOX’. The first cast iron pillar post box was erected in Sydney in 1856 near Customs House at Circular Quay. The now well-known post-office red appeared in 1874 as the Australian pillar post boxes were originally painted a bronze colour (Sydney Morning Herald 1954; King 2009).

In NSW, the successful tenders for manufacture were both the Robert Bubb and Sons Victoria Foundry and the Triggs and Marr Foundry. Robert Bubb was born on 23 June 1805 in Avening, Gloucestershire, England. He migrated to Australia and established the Victoria Iron Foundry. This foundry was listed in the Sands Directory as being located at 10 Victoria Place, Sydney. Triggs and Marr were established in Sydney as blacksmiths in the 1860s by Henry Triggs and Gordon Marr. The first foundry was located at Market Street before moving to 183-187 Clarence Street and then to Kent Street. Between 1874 and 1881, William Taylor joined the firm which was then renamed the Central Foundry of Triggs, Marr, and Taylor. In 1879, the company secured a three-year contract to manufacture cast-iron letter receivers at £12. 5s. 6d. each; iron newspaper receivers at £21; and small letter receivers at £3. 3s. In 1881, Taylor left the business and in 1887, the business moved to Pyrmont, on the corner of Union and Jones Streets. Triggs left the business in 1903, which then became Marr and Son Pty Ltd (Simpson 2017).

Cobb and Co.

From 1828, the government began to invite tenders for mail carriage and delivery by both land and sea and quickly, a modest postal network developed, with weekly road services as far as Bathurst and Goulburn and sea services to Newcastle and Hobart. In 1835, Governor Bourke approved an act that regulated a standard rate for urban services while a schedule was introduced for inland mail based on weight and distance, a system still operating for larger mail and packages (McLachlan 2009). By 1838, there were forty post offices in the colony, with more than 100 being opened through European settlement expansion. By 1845, both Sydney and Melbourne had two official deliveries a day and in 1849, uniform rates of postage (including two pence for a regular letter) were introduced and established across the colonies.

The Australian gold rushes stimulated the growth of post offices because population and demand for postal services increased. Moreover, gold and banknotes were always sent through the postal system for security. From the 1850s, each major rural centre had a postmaster of its own and the establishment of a post office represented as a symbol of European civilisation and a cultural enhancement to their town (McLachlan 2009).

On 30 January 1854, at 6 a.m., the first Cobb and Co. coach set out from the Criterion Hotel in Melbourne bound for the Forest Creek diggings. Four young Americans—Freeman Cobb, John Lamber, John Murray Peck and James Swanton—had formed the American Telegraph Line of Coaches in 1853, importing coaches and harnesses from the United States. Soon their business became more commonly known as Cobb and Co. The new American partnership seized the opportunity promising a regular and well-organised service. The coaches were built by Abbot Downing of Concord, New Hampshire, and painted bright red with yellow livery and wheels. Generally the horse-drawn carriages could have averaged up to eight miles, or sixteen kilometres, per hour. Tired horses were changed for fresh horses at staging posts around twenty miles, or twenty-five kilometres, along the route.

In 1861, a new partnership led by American James Rutherford bought the Cobb and Co. business. Bathurst became the new headquarters for Cobb and Co. in NSW. Rutherford was a dynamic force within the company, continually on the road, checking the condition of equipment and the horses in changing stations and surveying road conditions. Coach companies became increasingly reliant on winning mail contracts. In 1863, Cobb and Co.’s coaches became the official carriers of the Royal Mail in both NSW and Victoria. Mail runs subsidised the cost of passenger travel. In 1870, Cobb and Co. had mail contracts valued at £95,000 per year (Bathurst Regional Council 2004). Unfortunately, bushrangers were active during the 1850s and 1860s, with many coach drivers regarded being ‘bailed up’ by bushrangers as part of the job description.

Meanwhile, as other Australian colonies were established, so were their postal services. This increased demand on postal services originated from the intake of single literate middle-class immigrants, which resulted in a regular exchange of correspondence with family and businesses from their homelands (McLachlan 2009). Van Diemen’s Land’s (Tasmania) postal service reflected the penal nature of the colony in using convict foot messengers as postmen. Western Australia’s postal service was interesting because, from 1841, the mail from England was unloaded not at Fremantle but at Albany on King George Sound, from where it was taken by road to Perth. South Australia, as befitted a planned and rational community of free men and women, had a regular and efficient postal service based on the English model right from the beginning, while postal development was slowest in Queensland, where Brisbane did not have a fulltime postmaster until 1852.

Construction of Post Offices

In many towns and villages, postal services were initially often offered as an optional service to a larger venture such as a coaching inn or grocery store. However, in 1863, the Postmaster General Major William Harvie Christie advised that it was important that postmasters should reside and sleep under the same roof as the independent postal office. This arrangement facilitated receiving mail, which could arrive by coach or train at any hour of the day or night. Many purpose-built post offices were subsequently, constructed as modest two-storey buildings with postal services on the ground floor with the postmaster’s residence on the upper level. McLachlan (2009) argues that the employment of women as postmistresses allowed for a synthesis of both retail and domicile duties. Interestingly McLachlan (2009) also points out that the building of the post office within the vicinity of the local courthouse and/or police barracks was because the postmaster in some rural communities held a dual role of local magistrate or police officer.

With finances fuelled by the NSW and Victorian gold rushes, Colonial Government architects began to design and build enormous and imposing post offices in major provincial towns as statements of the authority and presence of the Colonial Government. In many towns, the post office was part of an official precinct, with the police station and courthouse built nearby. If the topography permitted, the railway station would be part of the same civic precinct. The post offices of Australian country towns in all colonies became monuments and symbols of state power and many now remain as monuments to the wealth sourced from gold.

This was also the era when each of the colonies built imposing, even pretentious General Post Offices (GPO) in their capital cities. For sheer bravado and statement making, nothing quite exceeded Sydney’s GPO. First opened in 1874 and extended in 1887, the Sydney GPO eventually occupied an entire city block. Melbourne’s GPO had opened earlier in July 1867. Adelaide and Brisbane GPO’s both date from 1872, while Hobart’s was built much later and opened in 1905. In all cases, these buildings were among the largest and most imposing in the colonial capital cities. They became the points from which road distances were measured throughout each colony and were administrative offices and sorting centres as well as public facilities for sending letters, parcels and telegrams. All ultimately were surmounted by a clock tower visible widely across the city, a clear symbol of the post office’s role in regulating the pace of business and social interaction throughout each colony (Lee 2003).

Telegraph Services in Australia

From the beginning, Australia’s telegraph service was managed by the Colonial Post Office. The first electric telegraph connection, built by Samuel McGowan, ran between Melbourne and the port of Williamstown (Delaney 2016), with the first Morse code message being received in March 1854. One of the earliest messages transmitted by telegraph in Australia was the first account to reach Melbourne of the Eureka rebellion on the gold fields at Ballarat in December 1854. By 1858, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide were connected. Tasmania was connected in 1859.

Introduced to NSW in December 1857, prior to amalgamation with postal services, the telegraph was operated by the Internal Communication Department under the control of the Secretary for Public Works (McLachlan 2009). The NSW Colonial Government constructed two lines from the Sydney General Post Office, one to the South Head Signal Station, the other to Liverpool. Development was slow in NSW compared to the other states, with the Government concentrating on the development of country offices before suburban ones. As the line spread, however, telegraph offices were built to accommodate the operators. Unlike the Post Office, the telegraph office needed specialised equipment and could not be easily accommodated in a local store or private residence. Post and telegraph offices operated separately until 1870 when the departments were amalgamated, after which time new offices were built to include both postal and telegraphic services (McLachlan 2009).

Connecting Australia to the rest of the world via the electromagnetic telegraph system became a possibility after the successful establishment of the transatlantic telegraph line in 1865. Soon after John McDouall Stuart had returned to Adelaide from his sixth attempt to cross Australia from South to North in 1862, the South Australian government conceived the plan of building an electric Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) to Port Darwin to connect with the submarine cable from (Java) Singapore, which the Eastern Extension Company was planning to lay. Amazingly, the construction of this national asset was fully funded by the colony of South Australia. Sir Charles Todd (1826–1910), the South Australian Superintendent of Posts and Telegraphs who had successfully connected South Australia to Melbourne by electric telegraph in 1865, was placed in charge of the project (Lee 2003). Todd at first had preferred a circuitous route along the coast of the continent, but eventually opted to follow John McDouall Stuart’s pioneering route from Adelaide to Darwin through the centre of the Australian continent (Moore 2010).

The OTL cable route was divided into three regions: the northern section from Port Darwin to Tennant Creek was contracted to the private contractors of William Dalwood and Joseph Derwent, the southern section from Port Augusta to Alberga Creek was assigned to the contractor Edward Meade Bagot and the South Australian Government assigned five teams of men to the 970 km central section. Eleven repeater stations, 200 km apart, were built to reinforce the signal as it travelled along the 3,178 km telegraph line (Lee 2003). Starting at Port Augusta, repeater stations were constructed through necessity at desert waterholes: Beltana, Strangway Springs, the Peake, Charlotte Waters, Alice Springs, Barrow Creek, Tennant Creek, Powells Creek, Daly Waters, Katherine and Yam Creek ending at Darwin (Flinders Rangers Research 2017). On 15 September 1870, the first pole of the OTL was erected in Port Darwin (Moore 2010). Despite delays due to monsoonal weather, the completion of the electric OTL occurred, almost two years later, at 3.15 p.m. on 22 August 1872 when engineer R. C. Patterson joined the northern section line to the southern section at Frew’s Ponds