Maryborough’s Post Office: Where Time Kept Sailors Afloat

Maryborough’s Post Office, a rare masonry example of a post office from the 1860s and the oldest operating PO in Queensland, was completed in 1866 and became the source of much irritation, particularly about heat and time.

Standing sentinel beside the entrance to Queen’s Park and anchoring historic Wharf Street, the picturesque building was designed in Renaissance Revival and Italianate styling. As a time teller, it seemed it was jinxed.

Because of tight budgets, Maryborough’s design was co-ordinated with the post office being built at Rockhampton but the orientation became muddled and Maryborough’s PO faced the western sun. For more than a century customers and staff endured the savage heat of summer afternoons. Air conditioning now helps.

Co-ordinating time was also a problem for Maryborough. A time ball was hauled on to a low roof tower and on July 10, 1866, the Chronicle announced that the time ball would fall that day at 1pm and daily thereafter at the same time, Sunday excepted.

The rise and fall of the 80lb ball allowed captains of ships at the wharf (needing to keep track of the high tide) and anyone else within vision to get an accurate fix on the time, which was telegraphed from Brisbane. Less than a year later there was a gloomy report that the time ball was not working because the halyards had rotted and broken.

The pole on which the ball ascended was part of the roofing and too slender to climb. The Chronicle urged that it be repaired – “it has become almost indispensable to methodical, punctual Maryborough” – the time ball seems have worked on sporadically.

Citizens were helped to be methodical and punctual when city’s famed time gun arrived 10 years later but citizens continued to agitate for a clock face on the post office tower. A tower with two clock faces was installed in 1879 but never worked properly. Neither did a new clock installed in the early 1900s or any of the replacements over the next century.