The efficiency of the colonial postal services

 Over on one of my other blogs, I mentioned that I'd acquired another example of a colonial period postcard.

It's one issued by the postal service in South Australia meaning it would have been posted there - before Federation the colonies ran their own postal services.

Strangely there's no South Australian post mark but there is one for Melbourne for the 31st of March 1898.

Flipping the card over

we see that the message is dated for the 30th of March, suggesting that the Melbourne post mark shows when it was received by the Victorian postal service, a day after it was written in South Australia and suggesting that the card was sent overnight by rail between Adelaide and Melbourne.

Nowadays, a letter or package takes two or three days to travel between the two, but it's worth pointing out that until about fifteen years ago, a letter to Sydney from Canberra would almost certainly arrive the following day, and a letter to Melbourne might just make next day delivery but would definitely be there the second day after posting.

Even more amazingly, an airmail letter posted on a Monday morning in Canberra to an address in rural Scotland would reliably arrive on the Friday.

Not only does this demonstrate how valuable a fast and efficient postal service was to people in the nineteenth century, when the post was the default means of communication, but also that the marked decline in delivery speeds has only happened once electronic communications became the default ...