Gippsland's posties

In about 510BC, a fair while ago, Greek historian Herodotus, perhaps the first real historian, wrote of the Persian system of relay riders, the first 'pony express'…as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day's journey, and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heart nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed route with all speed…"
Later the US Postal Service, which had the pony express legend in its past, adopted an unofficial motto from Herodotus' work. "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
There was truth in that old saying that the mails must get through, and honour. The Royal Mail is so called because it was a service that belonged to and served the reigning monarchs of England and in 1635 Charles 1 recognised the importance of reliable mail service to the whole community and opened it up to all.
So when you see the postie coming in his yellow outfit and on his quarter-litre motorcycle, you are looking at one end of a very long and very proud tradition. You are looking at the visible sign of something upon which our whole way of life still depends, even with the electronic systems we use.
We never had the relay riders, though. Our early, horse-borne mails were generally carried by one man alone, often in some really rough places. Some of our blokes made the pony express look like an easy gig, and it lasted only 18 months anyway.
In 1846 a mail run was begun between Melbourne and Port Albert (Palmerston) through Dandenong. The mail was carried on horseback by a postman who had to take the long way around. He'd follow the Gippsland track as far as Flooding Creek, later to become Sale, then turn down to the southwest through the flats between the sea and the eastern Strzeleckis toward Alberton and Palmerston.
Thomas Spender won the tender for the job and contracted to do the round trip once a fortnight, for 220 pounds per annum. The mail left Melbourne at 1.45pm sharp every Tuesday and had to be in Alberton on Sunday. Spender had an easy ride to Dandenong and headed off up the track.
He left Alberton on Thursday every second week and had the mail in Melbourne around noon on the following Monday. The trip took four and a half days each way
This fortnightly service was the only mail delivery to Dandenong itself, until 1849, when it got a weekly service and then a daily service for the Melbourne-Dandenong stage. The mail from Melbourne left at lunchtime on a Tuesday and was in Dandenong by close of business. The return mail left Dandenong at 6am and was in Melbourne by lunchtime. If you liked your sleep you would not be wanting to hurry to catch the postie.
From Dandenong eastward into Gippsland the service was still only once each way each fortnight. The route to Alberton was described as passing through Mount Ararat, Tyers Cut and Flooding Creek.
When the passenger coaches began to travel the colony's roads they carried the mails and the postie on his horse, sometimes with a packhorse, was relegated to the areas off the beaten track. The mail contracts were what the made the coaches profitable.
We had little trouble getting the mails organised in the Port Phillip District. John Batman handled the mail in Melbourne until William Lonsdale arrived in 1838 as Police Magistrate and took over the task in 1836. Lonsdale gave the job to customs officer Robert Webb in February 1837 but in April E.J. Forster, Clerk to the Magistrates' Bench, took over the role and was the first official postmaster.
There were five more official postmasters in about 18 months after that. David Kelsh was appointed in August 1939 as the first full-time postmaster and in that year Melbourne got its first Post Office building.
"By the end of 1839, letters and newspapers handled by the Melbourne PO had reached nearly 40,000, compared to less than 2,500 two years earlier. A census taken on March 2 1841 showed the population of Melbourne had risen to 4479, comprising 2676 males and 1803 females. The first official letter carrier was appointed and was paid 30 shillings a week and two letter boxes were built at the post office…By 1851 the population had risen to more than 23,000…"
This column has run away a bit and hasn't really got into Gippsland as it should have. I'll come back with more local information in a few weeks but here are two little excerpts that might trigger you imagination. "Thomas Gallagher started taking the mails into Grant in 1886." That meant horseback, and in winter riding a horse into Grant was not possible, though it had a population of 2000 plus five or six suburbs.
Interestingly Thomas Gow had that contract in 1910 and he and his hotel are defying my research quite stubbornly.
The 1932 Ski Year Book says "The mail boy came in and went out over the range on his 'snowshoes' every Sunday…"
It is worth adding before I finish that we had a couple of significant postal firsts in Australia. Originally, the sender did not pay postage - whoever got the letter paid that. In 1838, I think, James Raymond, an ex-convict who had risen to become Postmaster-General, introduced sheets of paper embossed with a seal, selling for a penny each, so that postage was now paid by the sender. This was before they had postage stamps in England.
At about the same time we got an overland mail run between Sydney and Melbourne, which was to bring an end to the practice of sending the mails by ship. James Hawdon, cattle-breeder and squatter, offered to run the mails between Melbourne and Yass. Hawdon secured a government contract at 1200 pounds a year. This was a very large sum but there was no real track to Yass, no bridges and aborigines who could be less than friendly.
Hawdon hired John Bourke to operate the run, and he did the 600 kilometres in six, with no changing of horses. Unfortunately, mails which took six days to get to Yass from Melbourne could take another six weeks to get to Sydney. For comparison, the American pony express riders changed horses every 30 to 40 kilometres and only rode for one day before handing over the mails.
Our posties and our horses were tougher than that.