By Pam Kiriakidis
The bluestone building that was Kilmore’s old post office turned 160 this year, and Kilmore Historical Society invited former staff to celebrate last Tuesday for history week.
Society members and former post office staff celebrated the birthday by discussing their own stories and recognising equipment or photos through the society’s display of archives.
Tom Stute walked through the old post office doors, familiarising himself with equipment technicians used to repair, including the switchboard and telephone lines that were connected to the trunk lines.
He said maintaining the exchange lines was part of the job when he first started at age 18.
“We’d do the maintenance on the switch boards, used to have full exchange lines that went out on the railway line from Melbourne. That’s all we had in those days.”
“Not like these days where you just pick up a phone and go anywhere in the world, you had to be assisted to make those calls.”
Mr Stute committed to technician work for 42 years, adapting over time, especially in the 1970s when a new exchange was built to accommodate automatic technology.
“In those days if you got a good job, you stayed there, not like today where people move around. And because jobs today are not everlasting, people tend to do everything by contract,” he said.
“Automation was the thing in those days, and of course is still continuing, but it’s currently totally different. Now the internet has taken over, and consequently, there’s no exchange lines left.”
The Kilmore post office swapped post masters for several years from 1843, until the 2000s.
Mr Stute was under Leo McNamara’s supervision, who had about six children running around upstairs with his wife Wilma while the post office operated downstairs.
“We see the children quite often, I see them growing up and becoming adults,” Mr Stute said.
Former telephonist Lynette Myers was also under Leo McNamara’s supervision, taking care of the local telephone exchange from 1960 until 1965, starting at age 16.
Ms Myers said she remembered the children upstairs, as she had created a bond with one of the McNamara children.
“The youngest one, I used to take him home sometimes in the afternoon and bring him back,” Ms Myers said.
During that period, there were four female telephoners who would complete shift work, taking in calls with numbers that needed to be remembered.
“You didn’t have time to look them up, because you’d stop to look up something, and there’d be another six calls coming in,” Ms Myers said.
Before the annual celebration, Ms Myers even wrote out a few to see whether she was close.
“I had them written down and I checked over there, and when I went over there, I thought ‘I wasn’t far out’,” she said.
In more recent times, the Kilmore Post Office offered jobs to contractors, as Glenda Pittaway joined in 1992 to sort mail and deliver local mail beyond the township boundaries.
“You came in, you sorted in the morning, and then you went in your own car, because you were a contractor and then you went out and delivered,” Ms Pittaway said.
Ms Pittaway delivered mail in Kilmore and Kilmore East, where roads were still not even completed.
“Right up to Broadford Road, right down behind the racecourse, down the hill, Kilmore East Township and out towards Wandong, and in those days, the Wandong Road to O’Gradys Road was dirt, and that didn’t go through,” she said.
Ms Pittaway said in her time the building was completely different, as the upstairs rooms were derelict, and the building itself was starting to show its age, with doors that were falling apart.
The original post office was privately sold in 1995 and moved further down the road where scanners were introduced and provided bigger space to operate.
“It’s all done with scanners now – the scanners came in when I was down there,’ Ms Pittaway said.
“It’s not even the same because there are no posties anymore, they’re all contractors, so it’s very different, the town’s very different.”
Since the move, the original post office went in many directions, including a popular antique shop, and restaurants over the years.
The building sat empty again until 2020, when Kilmore Historical Society negotiated a lease to run the old post office as Kilmore’s museum.
