We had also read an article in the 'Weekly Times' country newspaper about the last aerial postman in NSW, who does a once-weekly Saturday mail run out of Broken Hill, and noted the fact that he had room for two passengers in his plane. We decided to take the mail run before it too succumbed to 'progress' and creeping corporatisation.
Picking a free fortnight between hospital visits, we drove to Mildura,
a large agricultural and irrigation town on the Murray river in NW
Victoria, in early June. After an overnight stay we crossed the river
into NSW and stopped to view the Perry Sandhills, a curiously
desert-like area rising abruptly from the farmland all around and
endlessly re-sculpted by the wind.
Shortly after, this roadside sign set the tone for the next 270 km of increasingly dry landscape to Broken Hill. This is the 'Silver City Highway'. I believe we passed only three cars, all going in the opposite direction.
Broken Hill, as its name suggests is a mining town, dominated by giant
slagheaps and abandoned pitheads, with a long history of hardship and
social struggle. It was founded in the 19th century to mine a huge
orebody of silver, lead and zinc, and still does, although the
appalling early conditions which led to a cemetery holding 60,000 (in a
town of 23,000) obviously no longer exist.
Unexpectedly, the town has a thriving arts culture, with dozens of galleries to visit. In fact our trip coincided with an exhibition of Archibald Prize entries at the municipal centre. We agreed with the judges :)
We rented a 'tinny' for four days - the local affectionate name for a restored historic miners cottage, all mod cons on the inside but retaining the authentic corrugated iron exterior. Although the days were warm and sunny, we were not prepared for scraping ice off our windscreen as we got up at 5.30 a.m. for our postal run. It is cold inland as well as hot!
We
arrived at the airport in the dark to the sound of the engine warming
up, and climbed into the plane, observing that it was a 1964 model,
about 20 years older than our oldest car...
Dave the postie flies a figure-eight pattern reaching East from Broken Hill and almost up to the Queensland border, about 1000 km in total.
He aims to get off at dawn and return by 3 p.m., dropping the tourists off at the opal-mining town of White Cliffs at the crossing point, and picking them up again on the return leg.
We took off at first light and headed off to the first maildrop, aiming to arrive shortly after sunrise.
Dave
proved to be quite familiar with our part of the world, and could even
describe Morgans Beach and our lighthouse from the air.
Although originally a butcher by trade, he had always wanted to fly, an
ambition no doubt helped by having an uncle who owned a flying school
:)
The plane, originally a six-seater, had the rearmost pair of seats removed to carry larger parcels and emergency deliveries such as farm machinery parts &c. Today most of the room was taken up by a new windsock for a station airfield, while the free rear passenger seat next to me was piled high with mailbags and bundles of letters.
After about half an hours flying we came in for our first outback landing on a dirt airstrip. Note the long morning shadows and the famous red colour of the outback soil.
Joc had taken the co-pilots seat on the outward journey, agreeing to deliver the mail to the mailboxes (there is no door on the pilot side of the plane).
She was cautioned in no uncertain terms not to walk in front of the wing but to walk around the back when it was necessary to deliver to a mailbox on the opposite side of the plane. More than one person has walked into a spinning prop...
Due to the noise of the engine, passengers need to wear headsets to communicate, both with Dave and with each other. They worked quite well and enabled us to receive a running commentary on things of interest, as well as to interrogate Dave about all aspects of the job and the surrounding countryside.
At
the first maildrop Joc got to practice climbing out the door in the
freezing slipstream carrying a mailbag, while I sat inside in the warm
and tried to take photos with her tiny camera through the somewhat
scratched perspex windows :) Dave also picks up mail for posting, so in many cases it was to be a matter of exchanging one mailbag or bundle of letters for another. The most common mailbox seemed to be an old square fridge, although there were several based on oil drums and a few other contraptions.
They are placed centrally on the runway, allowing access from either approach direction. About half the runways had an alternative cross runway for landing in different wind conditions. These tended to be on those stations where the owner had one or more planes of his own.
The country around Broken Hill is dry, even for Australia, although we
had coincidentally arrived shortly after a moderate amount of rain had
fallen. In places the countryside resembled a NASA picture of Mars, while elsewhere small patches of greenery and standing water were visible.
Stock-watering tanks or dams seemed to have picked up water, although they might have been filled by windpumps from deep bores, we couldn't tell.
In all directions, the vastness of the country was apparent to the far horizons. However stations around here are only tens of thousands of acres, rather than the hundreds of thousands or even millions of acres in the Northern part of this country.
There is also a 'land' mail run operating closer to Broken Hill which
does a 550 km round of dusty, corrugated roads in a 4-wheel drive
vehicle. He takes passengers along also, but we can do that sort of
stuff by ourselves :)
Dave usually makes about 30 maildrops on his run, depending on conditions. This time, five or six stations had called in to say their airstrips were waterlogged and too soft for landing. Their mail would have to wait another week...