When Matraville Post Office was threatened with closure, the local Federal Member Peter Garrett was quoted in the Southern Courier as saying that the new facility would be state-of-the-art and “provide easy access, better parking, and more post office boxes”.  That was April 2010.  In the Southern Courier in January 2011 he issued a ‘call to arms’ to save Kensington Post Office and urged those concerned to attend a rally the following Thursday morning.   The distance from the Kensington PO to the closest at UNSW is no greater than between the former Matraville PO and the new Hillsdale PO and unlike Hillsdale  UNSW is at least in the same municipality.  Despite calls for the Post Office to return to Matraville after the Peninsula Development was finished it remained at Hillsdale accessible from Bunnerong Road (limited parking) or if visiting Southpoint after walking through a retail shop between racks of clothes. When this shop was recently closed during the shut down there was no access from the main shops and parking area.   (Cartoon above in Sydney Morning Herald 21/1/11; Letter to the Southern Courier, 8/2/11)

Post office on the move, appeared in Southern Courier 17 March 2010 (published on page 17 of Issue 13/4/2010), Nick Moncrieff-Hill (Matraville post office is about to close.)

Residents have called for the reversal of plans to close two Australia Post offices at Matraville and Eastgardens and replace them with a central post office at Hillsdale.

Australia Post confirmed last week it would be closing offices at 536 Bunnerong Rd, Matraville, and Westfield Eastgardens, to open a new office at Southpoint Shopping Centre on May 24.

Although the new post office will be between the two closing venues and only about 500 metres from them, residents and councillors said this was enough to create hardship for some locals.

“A lot of people in the area are elderly and that is quite a big change in distance to walk; good exercise for some but if the weather’s bad or it’s winter, asking elderly people to walk is unfair,” Randwick Liberal councillor Robert Belleli said.

The president of the Matraville precinct committee said the closure of its local post office was a blow for the suburb’s future.

“We are pretty devastated, because we were hoping the office would return to its original location at 495 Bunnerong Rd,” Carlos Da Rocha said.

“We were really looking to revitalise Matraville, but now local oldies are being forced to walk all this way.”

After speaking to the federal Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, Kingsford Smith MP Peter Garrett said he had been assured the new facility would be state-of-the-art and “provide easy access, better parking, and more post office boxes”.

Post office boxes at Matraville post office will be relocated to the new post office. Post office box numbers will remain the same and customers will be able to gain access using their present key.

Note: that the reference to a distance of 500 metres is incorrect – it is much closer to 1km than 500 metres and has meant those south of Matraville, residents and commercial, have had further to travel to access post boxes.

One of the comments from the Southern Courier on-line website over 10 years ago:

Michael writes:
Posted on 3 Aug 10 at 04:34pm

They have a crazy system where there are four registers and two queuing points, with no clear guidelines about who gets served from which queue. You can be standing at the head of one queue, waiting for passport applications to be processed at the nearest two registers (don’t get me started), while new customers walk in at the other queue and get served ahead of you at the other two registers, with no intervention by the staff. With all the public outcry and angst about queue-jumping, you’d think they’d know better!