THE Bega Pioneers' Museum has countless files on people and places. This story of Bemboka residents wanting a post office is one of them. It was written by Olive Robinson.
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PRIOR to 1894 Bemboka was officially two adjacent villages, Colombo, and the private village of Lyttleton. The name was changed from Colombo to Bemboka on July 14, 1894. Lyttleton was not included within the town boundaries of Bemboka until October 12, 1923, in the Local Government Act.
It was when Bemboka was two villages in January, 1871, that local residents started petitioning for a Post Office between Nimitybelle and Kameruka.
The petition was signed by 46 people including two women, and the occupations listed were principally farmer-labourer, grazier-labourer, farmer or grazier.
Post offices already in the region were those at Twofold Bay, opened in 1844, Cooma and Eden in 1847, Bombala in 1849, Bega in 1856, Merimbula in 1857 and Nimitybelle in 1858.
The earliest record of postal services in the Bemboka region is in the Postmaster-General’s report for 1867, when E Reed of Bombala was awarded the contract from Kameruka to Nimitybelle with mail being conveyed once weekly by horse-back for the sum of 65 pounds per annum. In 1868 the contractor was Alexander McNaught for 70 pounds, followed by W R Hopkins in 1869 for 50 pounds, and later P Brown in 1872 for only 46 pounds per annum. In 1876 the contract was broken up into two sections, Nimitybelle to Brown Mountain once a week, and Brown Mountain to Kameruka twice a week, with a contract price of 100 pounds per annum, and both contracts were performed by Brown on horseback.
It was the practice of the Postal Department on receiving a request for a Post office from an isolated community to seek the opinions of local postmasters, and the Postal Inspector, Vickers Moyse. Moyse did not consider a post office was needed at Bemboka or Brown Mountain and suggested that “mail could be left in care of Mr J B Evans, Storekeeper”. Neither of the postmasters at Kameruka nor Nimitybelle were in favour of it either.
On April 7, 1871, J B Evans wrote complaining that Mr Whyte, the Nimitybelle Postmaster, was not giving all the mail to the mailman and was demanding five shillings from each person before handing over the mail detained. An instruction was apparently issued directing that the mail line, and the Postmaster was bound to hand over such letters to the contractor without a charge being made.
A second petition was sent on June 14, 1871.