If, in the future, we ever want a date to mark when the postal service began a terminal decline, today, the 15th of April 2024 would probably do as well as any other.
Today is the day that Australia Post finally admitted that letter volumes were unlikely to ever recover, and reduced street deliveries to three days a week.
To be fair, it’s been a long time coming.
Hardly anyone sends personal letters any more - and most bills are emailed. Postcards, both picture postcards and as a way of sending a simple note have more or less ceased to exist.
No more Aerogrammes or letter cards, and a future generation will not experience the anticipation of waiting for a letter from a lover overseas. All gone.
One could of course wallow in nostalgia, but basically the letter service is gone, and unlikely to ever come back. These days the only things I mail are official documents that for whatever reason cannot be scanned and emailed, or on a couple of occasions I've sent a letter to deliberately circumvent a useless virtual agent on a company’s website where they still published a street address but not an email address or simple plain online contact form with no useless ‘helpful’ AI built in.
But I’m ranting.
The demise of the letter service does however provide a serious problem for archival research. Scanned letters and letter books can be easily read, and people did tend to keep letters, either as keepsakes from family members or for official purposes as proof that something happened or was agreed.
Email messages, WhatsApp messages and the rest less so. We’ve seen the Covid-19 response enquiry in Scotland grind to an inconclusive halt over missing WhatsApp messages, and I know of one major insurance case where the tapes supposedly holding crucial archived email correspondence proved to be unreadable.
And while people have raised concerns, we’ve never really come to any conclusions. But one thing is certain, while today we can read Great Uncle Jack’s letters home from his time in the International Brigades during the Spanish civil war, we won’t be able to read any of today’s messages home.
Having dabbled in family history, I can see that’s a problem, it’s not just the loss of colour and background to flesh out an individual, often, as in the case of our hypothetical Great Uncle Jack, it might be the only real proof of where he was and what happened to him ...
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