Hobbyist John Delivers History's Postscript
The Age
Friday October 4, 2002
John Waghorn admits that his hobby has got a little out of hand. He has 30 filing cabinets, and indexes of more than 70,000 postal workers over the past 160 years crammed into three rooms at his Lalor home.
Waghorn is an amateur historian, an authority on the history of Victoria's postal services.
He can tell you how mail was delivered in the high country in the 1880s, where the town of Gobur was, or when the overland Melbourne-Sydney mail service began.
On Saturday, Waghorn will operate a stall at the Central Highlands Historical Association (CHHA) family and local history Expo in Ballarat to answer the public's questions. If an ancestor was a postmaster in a Victorian town, he might be able to reveal the person's occupation, income and working conditions.
The expo, held annually at the Aquinas Campus of Ballarat's Australian Catholic University, has a two-day lecture and event program, more than 70 heritage stalls, and representatives from 40 historical societies.
This year's theme is education and trades, with central Victorian school, mining and cemetery records available.
At one Saturday-afternoon forum, a panel of research experts will talk about colonial occupations, such as prostitute, undertaker, entertainer and possum-skin trader.
Until retiring 11 years ago, John Waghorn, 66, worked as an accountant for Australia Post, having started work in 1952 as a telegram boy at Balwyn Post Office.
He has always been fascinated by obscure country towns. In 1961, when he was an Australia Post money-order clerk, he discovered a ledger book dating from the 1880s.
The ledger recorded when safe keys were issued to post offices in Victoria - signifying their graduation from minor stamp-selling outlets to post offices that handled money orders and bigger parcels. Waghorn copied the 600 records and kept the copy at home.
In 1975, Waghorn heard that a post office at Gobur, north of Alexandra, was about to close, and he ended up helping the last postmistress write a memorial book. The post office had opened in 1868, and its first 10 years, at the onset of the gold rush, were its busiest. ``It had hung on by the skin of its teeth until they put in automatic telephone, then they put in roadside mail boxes, and that was it."
In 1983, he wrote the centenary booklet for the Narbethong Post Office, near Healesville, which has now also long closed.
In the early 1980s, Waghorn discovered that 30 years of Victorian postmasters' records - the names and dates of appointment and tenure from 1883 to 1913 - were missing, and so he filled the gap by copying records over from Public Records Office archives. It took him several years.
Occasionally, Waghorn comes across quirky stories. For example, once, in the late-1850s, the government found that the budget for stamp production was blowing out. So it stopped sending stamps to postmasters for several months.
And he discovered that in the late-1840s, an Englishman called Thomas Fletcher Waghorn (John Waghorn has not established if he is related) ran a camel route across the route of the Suez Canal for the Australia to England mail services.
Waghorn says the research has kept his brain busy in retirement. He is working on a book about the history of Gippsland postal services.
He says there were 1000 places in Gippsland that had postal services, including post offices, pubs, stores and ``loose bags" - a farmer designated to look after delivered mail.
``History was my worst subject at school," he says. ``But it's something that's fairly easy to do.
``If I see an interesting bypath, I wander down there, and do what I like. It's great. It keeps you occupied, keeps you away from the pub."
For details about the CHHA History Expo, go to www.ballaratgenealogy.org.au or call 5331 7006.
© 2002 The Age
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