‘I remember when snail mail was popular and the postie came twice a day’

Being very old, I remember the good old days of letter writing or parcel sending, the times when the postman called twice every day except Saturday, (only one delivery then, and Sunday of course, that was a day of rest for the postman)!

A letter cost only a few pence to send and always arrived at its destination within a couple of days at the most. Letters sent to someone in the same town, posted in the morning, would very often get there that afternoon, and it would be dropped through the mail slot in your front door, rather than a box just inside the front gate. No walking down the path in pouring rain to get the post before it was ruined by the water; the only effort required, (if you didn’t have a small cage fixed inside the front door), was to bend down and pick the envelops up from the carpet.

Parcels too, arrived promptly, brought by another postie in a van, so if you received a package that way, well that meant you had three deliveries that day, instead of the regular two! Of course, letters or parcels from overseas took rather longer than they do now, in fact considerably longer, not through any fault of the postal service, but because that sort of mail usually arrived by sea – a delivery between Great Britain and Australia could take at least 35 days, depending on how many ports of call the ship had to make on the way.

At least overseas mail is a lot cheaper now than is used to be. Christmas was an especially busy time, with millions of Christmas cards being sent, to everyone, from everyone it seemed, plus masses of posted Christmas presents as well. I lived in England until the late 1950s and was at an age where I could become a casual postman for a few weeks, something done by thousands of students like me, to earn a bit of extra pocket money.

I was employed on parcel deliveries myself, which meant I spent my days in the back of a large truck full of parcels, which I had to grab as required, and rush off to the applicable address with them, while the driver just sat in the cab and moved on to the next address as soon as I returned. He was a regular postman, not a temporary, so he provided the skill, while I provided the labour!

Things have changed a little since then! The world is a vastly different place now, with most letters being sent by email rather than ‘snail-mail’, so in many places there’s not even a daily delivery service for letters, but only two or three deliveries a week, at best. On the other hand, parcelled mail order has become a monster, due to the simplicity of ordering goods online, plus at the present time, the worldwide difficulties raised by the Coved-19 pandemic; we now, even in our small country town, get parcel deliveries seven days a week, as Australia Post tries to keep up with the pressure. On the other hand, again mainly because of Covid19, mail, especially from overseas, can take as much as three months to get to where it’s supposed to be going; many sorting offices both in Australia and abroad, have been closed down due to staff shortages because people are either sick of the virus, or are in quarantine for having been in touch with someone who is.

Another enormous change brought about by the world of electronics, is that parcels can now be traced all the way from the sender to the recipient; I even get an email telling me I have received the parcel that I am holding in my hand sometimes, having just accepted it from the Aussie Post driver at my front door! So I guess it’s all a matter of swings and roundabouts really, what we lose in the efficiency of letter delivery, we gain in having email; what we lose in the speed of parcel delivery, we gain in at least knowing where it is, until it arrives.

I just wonder sometimes, what can possibly happen to the mail in the future – will it cease completely, with what little mail there is having to be picked up by the recipient from some collection point, or will there be a ‘drone-revolution’ with letters being delivered automatically by one of those miniature helicopters? It’s going to be interesting to watch over the coming years I think!