Cycle Express

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30763, 29 May 1965, Page 12

Cycle Express

(Specially written for “The Press’* by

KENNETH ANTHONY.)

T’HERE seems something A incongruous about the idea of using bicycles to maintain communications in the midst of a gold rush, but that is what happened in the Coolgardie goldfields of Western Australia in the 1890’s. Here are two stamps to prove it. As prospectors set off to make their fortunes, they travelled into areas where no ordinary postal service had ever existed (or been required) before. In 1893, therefore, James A. Healy established his Coolgardie Cycle Express Company to meet the need for a regular mail and messenger service on the many diggings which were then being worked.

One of his advertisements read: “Special Cycle Messages. Having engaged the services of the following Special Cyclists ... we are prepared to convey messages to any part of the Field, by day or night, at shortest notice.” At first the service ran from Coolgardie to Southern Cross, a distance of 120 miles which the hard-pedalling “Special Cyclists” covered in 10 hours. Later it was extended to other centres, and at one stage went as far as Lake Darlot, 280 miles from Coolgardie. In 1894, as a convenient means of collecting his charges, Healy issued his own

stamps. The two values were Is and 2s 6d, for the weights which could be carried on a bicycle were of course limited, and rates were high. The illustration shows facsimiles of these stamps, produced with an appropriate overprint by the organisers of a stamp exhibition at Sydney in 1964, when a re-enactment of the Cycle Express was staged to mark its 70th anniversary.

For two years after the stamps first appeared, Healy’s service continued to prosper. Then he produced another stamp issue—and it was this that led to his downfall. The publicity surrounding the new issue aroused the attention of the Post Office of Western Australia. The authorities suppressed Healy’s organisation as an infringement of the official postal monopoly, and compelled him to withdraw bis stamps. Thus ended one of the very few cases on record of a mail service that relied entirely on cycle transport.