AUSTRALIAN MAIL SERVICE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXX, Issue 15124, 13 October 1909, Page 6

AUSTRALIAN MAIL SERVICE.

We hope that the good things we were promised from the alteration in the route of the Australian mail service will not be much longer delayed. "When the Post Office authorities decided to send the inward mails by way 1$ Auckland instead of by way of Bluff, we venturec? to suggest that the route that had been serving us well for a number of years should not be lightly abandoned; but the authorities very courteously explained to us how little we knew about the excellent work they were doing. We were duly impressed. But tho first mail by the •new route was delayed by a steamer broaking down somewhere along tho Australian coast, the second arrived a day late, on aocount of bad weather, and now the third has failed because the bags did not reach Auckland in time to catch the southern mail train. These disappointments may all be due to sheer bad luck and may not be repeated, but we remember that when the mails came by way of Bluff they arrived with the regularity of the railway service. Mails sent by that route are still doing so. By last night's express from the south we received our Home newspapers and parcels, but the steamer that is carrying our letters will not reach Lyttelton till this morning. The letters were to have special despatch under the new arrangement, and the newspapers and parcels were to be sent by the old route. The results of this last piece of postal enterprise so far are a little aggravating.