The riverboat Postman cruise is the last actual mail run in the country to be made by water. It services several small settlements on the banks of the Hawkesbury River just north of Sydney that have no or very little road access.
The cruise starts out at the wharf located right next to the Hawkesbury river train station at roughly 9:30am. From the marina you head out in an easterly direction across the river to the settlements of Wobby Beach before swinging around Danger Island and heading back upstream passing under the main Sydney – Newcastle rail and then road bridges.
Next you see Peat and Milson islands before passing the wreckage of the first HMAS Parramatta, the very first ship commissioned for the Australian navy on your way to the Bar Point community and then on up to Marlow before turning around and making your way back down the river, through Milsons Passage back to the wharf at Brooklyn.
The return time is around 1:15pm due to the fact that it is a working mail run. While they know how many deliveries they will have to make in a day, they do not know how many pickups there will be as if someone needs to send a letter they just flag the boat down from their jetty.
The tickets for the trip cost $50 each, while you can book in advance from what I could see there was no real need as it is a very large boat and most people on our trip just turned up and got tickets on the day.
When you buy your tickets, they also give you the option of buying a lunch of fish and chips on your return for $12 per person. The lunch is not served on the boat but rather from the Lifeboat Seafood restaurant located next to the wharf.
Overall, I’d say the day was very good and worth the money. There is impressively beautiful scenery on both sides of the river and it was interesting to see how people can live without their house having access to a road. One thing I would note though is that all of the smaller children on the boat were well and truly tired of being on the boat by the time we got back to the wharf.
