The former Post Office Complex, Kaikoura, is representative of many small provincial post offices, established in rural communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to provide vital communication and government services.
Opened in 1893, the Post Office building served for ninety years as a community hub until its closure in the 1980s. The Post Office's ancillary buildings - the former Carrier Telephone Repeater Station and the former Lines Depot - reflect changing communications technologies and the expansion of telephone use during the 1930s. The occupation of a portion of the new depot by the Employment Bureau during the 1930s further reinforces the former role of the Post Office as the local face of government, and also reflects the hardships of the Great Depression, and the progressive social agenda of the first Labour government.
The rich waters of Kaikoura have been a favoured kai moana source for Maori since the beginnings of settlement 900 years ago. By the seventeenth century, the Ngai Tahu pa of Takahanga was the dominant pa in the area, protecting both the coastal trade route and an inland route for the collection of pounamu for more than 200 years. In the summer of 1827-1828 however, Takahanga was sacked by Te Rauparaha, and its people killed or enslaved. Some survivors returned from Kapiti in the late 1830s, and a small kaik was formed on the former pa site. Twenty two acres of the site were set aside as Maori reserve in the 1859 Kaikoura Purchase, and occupied until the end of the 1870s.
Between 1861 and 1864 the Marlborough Provincial Council surveyed the Kaikoura district for closer settlement. In the new Kaikoura Township, an area adjacent to the Takahanga reserve was gazetted by the Council for government buildings. A police station was erected on the site in 1865, a courthouse in 1866, and at the beginning of 1867, a relay station on the newly-established inter-island telegraph line.
A regular postal service was established to Kaikoura in 1861, when William Blick won the contract for a bi-monthly mail service from Picton to Hawkeswood. Postman's Road, which skirts the base of Mt Fyffe, follows the line of Blick's route. By November 1861 a post office had been opened north of Kaikoura at Kekerengu. Following the establishment of Kaikoura township, a post office was opened there in November 1865. This office was probably in the Caledonian Hotel. After Walter Hailes took charge in 1866, the post office was shifted out to his house at Mt Pleasant. By April 1867 however, the post office branch had joined the telegraph office in its Torquay Street building, and telegraph office supervisor, Sutherland Macalister, became the township's first full-time postmaster. A savings bank and money order branch opened in the post office in 1869.
The significance of the colonial post and telegraph office was greater than simply its usefulness as a centre of communication. The post office as an institution also represented colonial progress, government authority, and national and imperial unity. The doggedness of the post office in ensuring the mail 'got through' has engendered many stories, and the buildings themselves frequently made architectural statements.
During the period of the Liberal administration (1891-1912), state services were expanded significantly. Within the Post and Telegraph Department, the construction of new buildings, replacement of older buildings and roll-out of telecommunications resulted in a nation-wide post office building boom. In Kaikoura, a new post and telegraph office was constructed adjacent to the site of the previous building in 1893. Designed by the Public Works Department, the new building followed closely the then standard plan for a small provincial or suburban post office. This was the simplest of three post office models developed from the 1880s by government architect John Campbell. It consisted of a one or two-storey block with a hipped roof and central gable, and was usually three bays wide and about nine by ten metres in size. A similar plan was regularly deployed for other small government buildings such as police stations and courthouses, and remained in use (with some variation) for more than two decades.
The Post Office was first extended in 1908, when a room was added to accommodate Kaikoura's first telephone exchange. The exchange opened on 11 January 1909 with sixteen subscribers. Twenty-seven years later, the next major addition to the post office site was also for telephone apparatus. This was the 'Carrier Station', a substantial three room concrete building erected to the north of the Post Office on the corner of Torquay and Kilarney Streets.
During the two decades following World War I, many more people wanted telephones, and a rapid expansion in telecommunications took place throughout New Zealand. In order to help meet demand, the Post and Telegraph Office enhanced the carrying capacity of the country's main telephone trunks with the 'Carrier' system, a recently developed application of radio technology. This system created extra voice channels on existing telephone wires by modulating the circuit frequencies above the 3 kHz necessary for ordinary conversation. The signal could subsequently be demodulated to produce normal voice signals. Implementation began in 1929, and was expanded from 1936 under the first Labour Government. By the late 1930s, the 'Carrier' network had provided 118 extra long distance circuits. Designed by the Post and Telegraph Office in 1935, the Kaikoura Carrier Repeater Station contained equipment providing 45 through channels and twelve local channels for toll and telegraph communication. It was constructed by contractors Williamson and Rose at a cost of £769, and opened in April 1936.
Two months after the opening of the Carrier Station, the construction of a second building was commenced - this time to the south of the post office on the Torquay Street frontage. This building was intended to house both the linesmen's office, store and garage, and the government employment bureau. The two services had previously shared the old linesmen's store, the inadequacies of which were becoming increasingly evident by the mid 1930s. By 1936, extensive line construction work in the district was placing the existing store under pressure. The employment bureau's quarters were also proving inadequate, given the significantly increased workload that the depression improving initiatives of the first Labour government (1935-38) were producing for the district's unemployment officer.
Most of the officer's new work emanated from the administration of railway construction parties and 'Sustenance Payments'. Following a three-year hiatus during the worst years of the depression, railway construction began again in earnest after Labour's election in 1935. By the end of 1936, 2,273 unemployed relief workers were labouring on the completion of three railways - including the long-awaited South Island Main Trunk Line - the unfinished portion of which passed through the Kaikoura district. Sustenance Payments were benefits paid to the unemployed who were 'fit for work', but for whom work was not available. The new weatherboard Lines Depot and Employment Bureau building was designed by the Public Works Department in Christchurch. The employment by the department of a hipped roof and sash windows in the new building suggests an effort to harmonise its design with that of the Post Office. The depot was built by contractor H. W. Rainey at a cost of £691, and completed in August 1936.
As early as 1929 a report to the Chief Post Master in Christchurch noted that the Kaikoura Post Office was both cramped and poorly sited for the township's business district in the West End. The issue was thereafter revisited on a regular basis. Significant alterations were proposed in 1936 as a stopgap measure, but were opposed by local citizens who feared that this would postpone the erection of a new building. A deputation waited on the Post Master General, who informed them that he could not make a decision on a new building until the completion of the Main Trunk Line and the selection of a site for the station. However despite the selection of the station site in 1938 and the completion of the railway in 1945, neither additions nor a new building were forthcoming.
Finally in 1949, despite the Kaikoura County Council's express desire for a new post office, the decision was made to proceed with a plan to significantly enlarge and reconfigure the existing building. Designed by the Architectural Branch of the Post Office's Property Division, the alterations and additions were constructed during 1950-51 by the Post Office's Mobile Construction Gang at an estimated cost of £2,500. The completed building incorporated a new mailroom, manual exchange, strongroom and interior facilities.
In 1950 a site was acquired for a new Kaikoura Post Office in Beach Road, near the new railway station. The site was never used for this purpose however, and it was not until 1983, more than fifty years after its replacement had been first mooted, that the Torquay Street Post Office finally shut its doors. A new post office was opened on 12 December 1983 on the Esplanade in the West End, but the manual telephone exchange continued to operate from the old building for a further eighteen months. At the time of its closure, the exchange was one of the largest manual exchanges still in service, with eleven switchboards and twenty-one staff. The opening of a fully automated exchange in Hastings Street in mid 1985 finally signalled the end of the Torquay Street site. The old Kaikoura Post Office buildings had become redundant due to a combination of obsolescence and the movement of the town centre to the West End, but their closure anticipated the widespread demise of rural and suburban post offices during the early 1990s.
The complex of former Post Office, Carrier Station and Line Depot was sold in 1986. The new owner began to convert the buildings into six flats. Following the arrival of mass tourism in Kaikoura during the 1990s however, the need for tourist accommodation became evident, and in 2001 the complex was converted into the Albatross Backpackers. This conversion involved further internal alterations to all three buildings. Significant external alterations were however limited to the insertion of French doors in the 1951 post office extension. In 2006 the buildings continue to provide tourist accommodation.
