Renovation of old Collingwood Post Office
Coronation Day 1911. People gathered outside the Collingwood Post Office (then five years old) to hear news of King George V and Queen Mary’s coronation in Westminster Abbey. On the left of the post office is Polly Cottier’s billiard saloon.
Visitors to Collingwood cannot miss the hefty pipe scaffolding and bright yellow safety net now surrounding the historic Post and Telegraph Office in Tasman Street.
The exterior renovation of the two-storey building will include a complete re-roof—replacing more than a few rotten native weatherboards and whole sections of framing and bracing—then finish with a new paint job. Owner Julia Griffiths said the building’s Historic Places Category 1 classification meant the work had to be sympathetic to the original and replicate its look, shape and appearance. Native timbers needing replacement have in this case been substituted with Douglas fir and Lawson cypress, as Julia didn’t want to use treated pine.
The builders are Lincoln Edwards, Peter Fersterer and Peter Sadowski. Pakawau painter Henk Zwanikken has already started from the top. For Peter Fersterer, the job has some family significance: his great-grandfather, Thomas McNabb, who described himself as a builder, contractor and local undertaker, built the place along with J Johnston in 1905 and part of 1906. The total cost came in at £1106.
In keeping with nineteenth and early twentieth-century business practice, the building incorporated both a public office and a private residence. Post office facilities were located on the ground floor at the front of the building and included private boxes, a mail room, a public office and a money order counter. A small lean-to on the rear of the ground floor accommodated the postmaster’s kitchen and dining room, while the upper floor contained four bedrooms and a sitting room.
The building’s interior still remains remarkably original, right down to the locked “rule book cupboard” amongst the shelves of the postmaster’s office. Many a local couple got married or registered their babies with the postmaster in this room. The big shed out the back still has designated sections—washhouse, workshop and tool shed, staff toilets, coal shed, family toilets—while beyond that there is more land for a garden.
Still considered a fine example of Imperial Baroque architectural style, the Collingwood Post Office is typical of many that were built to a design created by John Campbell (1857-1942), the Public Works Department’s “Draughtsman in Charge of Public Buildings”. Campbell trained in Glasgow and joined the department seven years after his arrival in New Zealand in 1882. Due to a heavy workload, Campbell created standardised post office plans that used the same range of forms repeatedly, although in differing combinations rather like, as one member of parliament commented about Campbell’s work, “a cook with one gravy”.
The building opened to big celebrations in 1906, after the previous post office burned to the ground in the disastrous fire that swept through the town two years earlier. Acting Postmaster-General and Attorney-General Albert Pitt declared it on the day “one of the best-fitted-up sub-offices in the whole colony”.
Although badly charred in the big Collingwood fire of 1930, the timber weatherboard building went on to survive yet another in 1967 when the town’s hall, remaining hotel and two shops were destroyed. It remained a working post office until 2000, when the Collingwood Postal Agency was built next door. The Old Post Office found a brief new life as a backpackers and an art gallery before Julia purchased it five years ago to be her home and business.
Gerard Hindmarsh
