Australia Post: Stan Addams looks back at his 53-year postie career
After delivering his first telegram at just 15 years old, postie Stan Addams has had plenty of memorable moments on the job, including being the first postman in the Penrith area to ride the now famous motorbike.
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Stan Addams was just 15 when he delivered his first telegram for the Australia Post.
Now, 53 years later, the long-time postman is taking a well-deserved two-month break.
Addams, now 68, was on the North St Marys beat for almost 40 years before moving to the St Clair run in 2012.
Before that, he spent two years as a teenager delivering telegrams and clearing out public payphones.
“I remember my first day quite well,” he said. “I met the postmaster Gordon Hill and he had me swear an oath, I had to put my hand on the bible and read a passage out that I wouldn’t divulge any information about the post whatsoever.
“He said ‘when do you want to start?’, so I replied ‘when do you want me?’. He said, ‘sign the book and we’ll start now’.”
“I delivered a few telegrams the next day, and eventually got into the groove where I was delivering 350 to 400 a day.
“Part of the duties was clearing out the phones out the front of the office. We would take them into the postmaster, he’d open them and count, then it was my job to put the lid back on and seal it with a copper wire.”
He became a postman two years later, and was the first postman in the Penrith area to ride the now famous motorbike.
“Another old postmaster, Mick Clough, told me we’d be getting a motorbike soon, and he picked me out as the one to be trained,” he said.
“I used to ride my own bike to work, so I was the first postman to get a motorbike – that would have been in the late 1970s.
“Nowadays, every postie has to go to a ‘stay upright’ course at Eastern Creek, and you get trained by motorcycle guys who put you through your paces.
“When I first got the motorcycle, they came out to the old St Marys rugby league oval. I rode the bike around the football oval once, and they said ‘yep, that’s good, you’ll be right’.”
After half a century as a postie, Addams believes he has delivered enough mail to “fill a whole shipping container”.
“I’ve probably delivered close to a million letters, it could be even more than that,” he said.
“The traditional letters and cards have really dropped away unfortunately. At Christmas time in the 1970s you’d deliver almost 4000 letters a day, but you hardly get 2000 now.”
Addams hasn’t officially retired yet, but said he would make that decision over the coming weeks.
“We were going to go away, but COVID has put a stop to that,” he said.
“I’ll just be catching up, doing a lot of things around the yard, and hopefully looking forward to going away a bit before Christmas.
“I said I’ll come back, but whether it’ll be for one day or two months, I don’t know.”