Getting the inside mail on Ocean Grove Delivery Centre

FROM standard letters through to online shopping orders, the team at Ocean Grove Delivery Centre are busy ensuring residents on the Bellarine receive their mail.

In the past financial year, the centre has processed more than 911,000 articles, all sorted by the team before making their way to households around the region.

Delivery manager Russell Hyland said compared to previous years the number is down; however, parcel amounts are on the rise.

“Parcel volumes have picked up and the duties that the posties do have changed.

“A postie used to handle maybe 2,000 articles a day each. Now they might handle 700 or 800, but they have to go to the door, get a signature and hand it over to a person, whereas previously it was just everything in the mailbox.”

With new technologies, the posties now spend more time inside, putting the articles into their scanners before physically going out on the road and knocking on doors.

Operating out of Ocean Grove, the centre has 13 postie rounds, with contractors also delivering in Portarlington and St Leonards.

Within the centre is a team of 19 staff members, many of whom have been on the same round for years, getting to know the locals in their streets and improving their overall service.

Mr Hyland has been in his role for 16 years and during his time, has seen a number of changes from technology and safety improvements through to recent changes in how mail gets delivered.

“We’re starting to phase the motorbikes out, they’re getting really expensive to maintain and hard to maintain and they’re not that good for the environment,” he said.

“We’re going electric a lot, you may have seen the EDV [Electric Delivery Vans]… we’ve got these other ones that are coming out and we’ve been assessed to get them.

“They’re a little bit like the EDV, but the front’s a bit more like a motorbike; they’re called a Rapid Three.

“They handle like a motorbike, but they’ve got a solid bit on the back, like the EDV, fits a lot of parcels in it and you can lock them in and they handle pretty much any terrain.”

One of the main challenges posties face when delivering mail is access to people’s letter boxes.

Mr Hyland encouraged people to make sure they do not have any low-hanging branches and access is clear.