And many houses/units just have mailboxes on the roadside, very very common to get mail stolen from them. Post Office Boxes are far more common here for that reason - now costs me $120 a year for the privilege of actually getting my mail instead of having it nicked.

$120.00? You need to move! $60.00 here.

With Royal Mail incidences of post going astray are rare. Sounds like I'm going to miss that. But it could be worse: In South Africa caches of letters are often found stuffed under a bush because some postmen decide that chillin out under a tree is preferable to cycling around delivering pesky letters. Eish! ..Too many letters!

You would think that it would be cheap to rent a PO box, after all it's less work for the postmen.

I've just discovered that I should have set up a temporary redirection to my temporary Aus address for say 3 months and then cancelled that or waited for it to expire and then set up a new one to my more permanent address. It turns out that the only way to change the "redirect to" address is to cancel the existing one and set up (and pay for) a new one