Peter Rowe takes on Coober Pedy’s epic mail run

If you reckon you’ve got a gig that just seems to drag on forever some days, outback postie Peter Rowe’s got a good yarn for you.

Outback postman Peter Rowe recalls the day it took him 10 hours to drive from William Creek back to Coober Pedy – a 170km journey.

With a load of passengers on his bus, the trip would normally have taken him about 2½ hours, but this time he came up against a huge downpour that made the road treacherous at normal speeds.

“We left William Creek at 2 o’clock and got home at midnight,” he says.

“The first 70km wasn’t too bad, then we hit the rain and it was first and second gear all the way home to Coober Pedy.”

Mr Rowe, 77, has been working Australia Post’s Outback run from Coober Pedy for about 20 years, heading off from the opal-mining town to Oodnadatta and William Creek and stopping to service the stations in between, carrying mail and vital supplies.

Outback Postie Peter Rowe. Picture Simon Cross

He also takes passengers on some of his runs, extending the usual 10-hour round trip to about 12 hours, and giving tourists an insight to life in Central Australia along the way.

Mr Rowe caught the Central Australia bug as a young man looking to escape the Melbourne rat race, taking a road trip to Alice Springs and moving on from there.

“They say the moment you stand on a red sandhill, it gets in your blood and you never leave,” he says.

“By the time I got to Alice Springs, I rang up my mother and told her I wasn’t coming home.”

The friendly nature and mutual respect in the Outback are completely different to the life he left behind in Melbourne.

“My street had about 20 houses on it and I lived there from when I was six until I was 22, and I knew three of the people in those houses who I could talk to,” he says.

“You may have nodded to the bloke down the street but you never would have stopped for a yarn. Now you can’t go by without having a yarn.”

Mr Rowe’s Coober Pedy dugout tells the story of his former Outback careers, with rooms still set up with sculptures and potted products, and a gallery that now sits virtually empty.

Outback Postie Peter Rowe. Picture Simon Cross

The opal mines drew him to the town, in search of cash to buy a house in Alice Springs.

“When that went belly-up, I said to my wife (Konnie): ‘What do you want to do?’,” Mr Rowe says.

“She said: ‘I don’t want to leave Coober Pedy and I’ve always wanted a craft shop’. So, I decided to make pottery.”

After that, he started a tourism business taking passengers to Lake Eyre and the Painted Desert, until the man responsible for the mail run gave it up and Mr Rowe took over.

He services Mount Barry, Allandale, The Peake, Nilpinna and Anna Creek stations, where he often stops in for a cuppa and a chat – and the occasional roast dinner – and has gotten to know the pastoralist families over his two decades in the job.

“It’s been great to watch the kids grow up, and now I’ve gotten to the stage where I’m seeing people who used to do School of the Air on cattle stations, with their own children,” he says.

“And their kids are standing on the running board of the car saying, ‘Hey Rowey, I want to tell you a story’.”