Post Office Provided Communication Link for Early Settles - by Noela Stevens
By Noela Stevens
Public Relations Division
NZ POST OFFICE
Article requested by The Bay Sun, Tauranga for deadline January 5.
For 100 years the Post Office has provided Tauranga with a communications and banking service.
The establishment of the service was not easy. Mail deliveries were affected by stormy seas, wars and geographical difficulties.
A century ago the wild east coast of early New Zealand was a rugged place.
Its settlers were isolated and that isolation made communication with other settlers and relatives in England extremely important.
In Tauranga the people were walled off from the rest of the country by steep bush clad ranges. The mail came by coastal scows and small steamers plying a tough trade south from Auckland, The Bay of Islands and the Coromandel.
That service was unreliable and intermittent, yet it was the only way the people could communicate with the outside world.
The unsatisfactory situation upset local residents and they complained bitterly to Colonel Thomas Gore-Brown, then Governor of the Colony.
He responded to the complaint by establishing a mail service. This was a branch off the Auckland-Napier overland route with Maori runners carrying mail via Tarawera and Maketu.
A regular mail service was obviously necessary and the Post Office became the provider.
There is an unsubstantiated record of a Post Office opening in Tauranga on December 15, 1857. According to some historians this is not correct. They think that the old name for Gisborne ~ Turanga ~ could have been confused with Tauranga as the first recorded Postmaster there was Archdeacon A. N. Brown in 1863. At that stage the postal work was probably done at the Mission Station, Tauranga's historic "The Elms".
Archdeacon Brown did the job for a very short period and he was followed in May 1864 by a member of the Armed Constabulary, Sergeant C. Neville. During the two years following, money order facilities and a Post Office Savings Bank were introduced.
PERMANENT BUILDING
A permanent Post Office building was erected in 1871. This was destroyed by fire in November 1902 and all local records were lost. It was rebuilt in 1905 on the same site. Before the new building opened the Post Office used temporary premises. The first was in the Theatre Royal Building, the second in Price's old building on the corner of Harington Street and The Strand.
During this period the land wars disrupted the development of roads and the telegraph in the area. Mail deliveries were also disrupted. In March 1866 Tamaikowhai led a party of his men out to the coast and killed Wi-popata, the Arawa mail runner who carried the Government mail between Tauranga and Opotiki.
FIRST MAIL COACH
A red-letter day for Tauranga settlers was the day the first mail coach was driven through from Napier. This arrived in July 1873 after the main road from Taupo was opened. A riding party met the coach eight miles from town and formed a guard of honour on the trip to the reception which was held for the mail contractor, Mr A. Peters.
Mr Peters’ contract ran out in 1875 and the mail was then temporarily conveyed by the Armed Constabulary. The coach service was eventually re-established and in 1877 Messrs Hart and McKinley ran a regular weekly coach service between Napier and Tauranga via Taupo and Rotorua.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
December 1870 saw Wellington and Tauranga joined by a 50 mile long telegraph circuit. Tauranga resident, Mr J. A. McKenzie, who had joined the Post and Telegraph Department, was largely instrumental in establishing telecommunications in the area.
He also did pioneering telegraphic work in the Wellington and Wairarapa districts. At one stage it is recorded that he "left Wellington for the North on general repair and inspection work re telegraph lines and reached Tauranga three years later still carrying the same ladder he set out with."
This telegraph line continued north and reached Katikati in 1872 after crossing 13 tidal creeks, many mudflats and swamps. From Katikati the line followed the coast. After crossing the range at Waihi it continued on through to Omahu and then to Grahamstown (now Thames) where the final section in the Auckland to Wellington line via Tauranga was completed.
TELEPHONE EXCHANGE
Tauranga's first manual telephone exchange opened on April 29, 1908 with 35 subscribers. This number grew rapidly as demand for the telephone service escalated.
The exchange moved to the new Post Office building on the corner of Spring and Grey Streets when it opened in 1938.
In 1958 another 1200 lines were added to the exchange and it soon became obvious that another building would be needed.
May 1960 saw the laying of the foundation stone for the Tauranga Automatic Exchange building. Since 1959 when the Tauranga Exchange cut over to automatic with 7399 telephone subscribers, the demand rose to 18,055 in 1979 when link numbers were introduced between Tauranga and other exchanges in the area.
Now the busy exchange serves over 20,000 subscribers and about 2.2 million toll calls were made out of Tauranga up to November last year.
OTHER SERVICES
Post Office services to the community continue to increase. Telex facilities are popular. Tauranga has one of the highest public telex usages in New Zealand with 100 calls a month from the public telex booth and a further 37 full time subscribers.
The city also has 138 leased data circuits and the new Bureaufax service receives steady use.
With the introduction in 1970 of overnight composite buses operated by the New Zealand Railways, mail services to and from the Bay of Plenty were rearranged. The new services introduced later closing times for outward mails and a better delivery service for mail posted for the Bay of Plenty in the main North Island centres the previous afternoon.
Before 1970 the majority of mail for Tauranga was routed by train via Frankton.
Forging a link between the people and the rest of the world for more than 100 years, the Post Office has travelled through from coastal scow and mail coach into the age of telecommunication and the silicon chip.
This new technology will enable the Post Office to continue the same top quality service into the twenty second century
