Evening star., 1942-03-01
Where the MuiImun Calls
Twice q Month
BIZ Frederic J. HdSkin.

Gently was claimed by a 72-year- r-old Aus
tralian, Jim Crouch by name, who in
the past 81 years has carried letters and
other mail 2o7,428 miles on horseback
with pack saddle.
Mr.. Crouchs mail route, which ira
versed some of the roughest country in
the state of West Australia. is one Of
hundreds of thin, yet important lines
Of communication which link the lonely
settlers of Australia's sparsely populated
interior with the big industrial cities Of
the coast.
In Australia the mailman Is still q
subject for ballads and legends, and
there is one ballad that nearly every
Australian can recite. 1t is about a
drover called Clancy, who received q
letter addressed simply CLANCY of the
Overflow" the Overflow being a tract
of country about 5000 miles square.
There is good reason for this survival
of the romance Of pioneering and pio-
neering still goes on. Even today, when
the mailman often is equipped with a
truck, it is likely to carry things like
rubber floats for dealing with swamps
or rivers, or rolls Of coil mating for
making a portable roadbed when the
track leads across shifting sand or soft
silt beds OF rivers that flow only when
1t rains.
In outback Australia mailman needs
to be a good bushman and mechanic.
The great distances the mailman must
travel is revealed in a story told by a
car salesman from the United States who
recently returned from the distant conti-
nent A mailman smashed his clutch
disc, hooked up the telegraph wire
and ordered a new part. He waited a
week, then impatient, cut disc from
a steel oil drum and completed his
| journey, and returned 300 miles to his
base in time to receive the needed part.
| However, not all long distance mail
men have auto transport for their Jour-
neys. Australia still uses an occasional
| packhorse for the job in difficult places,
and many camel routes are maintained
! One Central Australian camel, a famous
mail carrier, now ambles over African
routes on similar task, and is credited
with having completed over 260, 900 miles
to date. In some parts Of the country
donkey teams ply. In the far North an
| 8-horse blackboard carriage does
monthly round trip Of $50 miles, and
/ loses an average of one horse each trip
between the severe heat and great floods
of the wet season. Letter boxes in the
back country are often days travel apart,
and the carrier on these loneliest CT
tracks becomes a man of all trades,
everybodys confldant and friend in need,
and in time, the oracle 81 his territory.
He is the one living contact with the
outside world.
There are few enough roads in the
vast territories of the interior. In 1910,
under the stress of war, army engineers
built the first permanent road linking
the continent across the center from
north to south. 1t will enable Austral~
ians to keep land contact between its
supply centers and war industries in
the south and east and strategic Darwin,
defense outpost on the Timor Sea- But
| the outback mailman has few roads.
He is lucky to have truck.
Great adventures always have hung
upon the mail, once it passed beyond the
point of sorting, and beyond the Aus
tralian equivalent of rural free delivery,
of which the antipodeans, because Of
the special conditions of their early set
tlement, devised a more expansive sys-
tenn than in the United States.
In the United States people have
become accustomed to mails and COM
munications being divided between Gov
ernment and private enterprise. Aus
tralians, from the moment military
force set foot ashore 153 years ago, have
promoted their entire system of COM
munication as a government monopoly.
| They never knew a Western Union or
a Postal Telegraph Co. Consequently.
wherever the mailman moves he does
so as a functionary integrated with the
national telegraph, telephone, and radio
systems. Any one there who sends
message by wire, wireless, or written
means pays revenue into the national
| funds Even where the letter goes to
any section of the 10000 miles Of iron
track, the track is government owned
and operated.
The mail in Australia, as in the United
States, must go through. There are no
special zone charges, and parcel post
must pay its toll by weight and not by
weight plus distance as in most cases
| in this country. Although rs per cent
Of the people live along the coast of the
continent, the IS per cent in the hinter-
lands must have their mail regularly.
People in the United States who know
| there is mail for population ratio OF
one person per Is acres have some idea
of what it means to mail-serve one per-
son to every 27O acres, which Is the
Australian ratio.
Several Americans, including Freeman
Cobb in 1853, and James Rutherford,
later, played an important part in the
development of both mail and gold
transport, using American designed
coaches with leather suspensions or
springs. At their peak they harnessed
5000 horses a day on $4,000 miles Of
route a week, making 1t the greatest
horsecoach mail system In the world,
and that, despite the government car
riage of mails with its own railways.
Development Of the telegraph In 1854,
the railway postal coach In 1879, the