I really can’t remember the last proper letter I received from a real person, as distinct from an optometrist reminding me to make an appointment or a real estate agent encouraging me to put my house on the market. It has been a very long time. For a while, the Christmas catch-up letter included with a Christmas card was popular, and I really quite liked receiving them. But as for receiving a letter from a friend for no particular reason – I haven’t received one for a long time.
As a historian who worked mainly with Colonial Office papers, it was always a bit of a thrill when you came across a personal letter as distinct from the “I remain your humble and obedient servant” type letters. It was as if, suddenly, a file has come to life and a real person has stepped out behind the platitudes. Certainly, some of those 19th century letters to and from ‘home’ in Great Britain followed a template as well, with an inordinate amount of time spent on the weather, given that the letter was going to traverse half the globe. Cross-hatched letters were infuriating, and much time was spent puzzling over a word or an abbreviation that a new pair of eyes would pick up in seconds.
Postscript is a selection of letters from the National Library’s huge collection of letters. In the introduction, Lauren Smith from the National Library explains their selection criteria:
The letters we finally selected, which span almost 200 years, are not necessarily the most famous or life-changing or emotional. What they do each contain is something human and real, something that gives us a sense of how much we have in common with those that came before, that gives us a sense of our own history. (p.v)
The letters were then taken up by present-writers, who were asked to choose one of those selected letters and, in response, write a new letter, addressed to whomever they chose, in some way inspired by the original letter from the Library’s collection. Most of the original letters are Australian- although there is a letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra- and the majority of them date from the 20th century. Of course, there’s an imbalance here in that the authors of the original letter could have had no idea that their letter would survive to appear in a book decades later, whereas the current-day authors are quite consciously crafting a letter for publication. Each dyad or triad of letters has a short introduction, explaining who the authors are, and giving a little bit of context to the letter.
Several of the letters are linked by the original and present-day letter-writers sharing the same profession. Sometimes three letters writers are involved. For example, there is a to-and-fro of letters between children’s authors Mem Fox and Morris Glietzman, who are joined by winner of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) award, Daniel Gray-Barnett who writes his own imaginary letter to a fellow CBCA award winner Andrea Rowe. Historian Frank Bongiorno writes a letter to the now-deceased Manning Clark, a prominent historian who would have been long retired from academe by the time Bongiorno embarked on his own academic career. In writing to Manning Clark, Bongiorno copied the lead of fellow historian Bill Gammage who also wrote to Manning Clark in 1984- the letter which is in the collection.
Sometimes there is a shared experience. Ranjana Srivastava, oncologist and writer whose column regularly appears in The Guardian writes an imaginary letter to the daughter of one her patients, remembering the recipient’s father and his kindness to her as his specialist. For Srivastava, the prompting letter was written by historian John Barrett, who wrote to his neighbours eight months before his death, telling them of his cancer diagnosis but encouraging them to just “tuck this knowledge away in the back of your minds”.
For me, not all of the letters were equally engaging. The ones that didn’t work for me were more intent on transferring knowledge of ‘what happened next’ to the deceased original correspondent, rather than responding to the emotion of original letter.
Sometimes the chosen recipient mirrored the relationship in the original letter. For example, Jane Austen’s letter to her sister Cassandra (which apparently the National Library holds) is mirrored by Kate Forsyth’s letter to her sister and co-writer Belinda Murray. Just as John Flynn (he of the Royal Flying Doctor Service) writes to his father as he’s about to embark on a new phase of his life, so in turn writer Michael Winkler writes to his sons about his own father.
But the letters I enjoyed most were from Sir John Monash to his 13 year old daughter Bertha where he writes a very detailed letter giving a run-down of what to expect on the railway trip from Spencer Street station to Windomal, a station over the Murray in rural New South Wales. This was matched by letters from poet Judith Wright to her husband and father after having a baby; and then by a letter from historian and author Maggie Mackellar writing to her daughter Arkie as she travels from Manchester to Doha. I’m not really sure why the Judith Wright letters are included here, but the Monash and Mackellar letters are full of the vicarious excitement and sorrow of letting a child move on to the next phase of their life.
When I first heard about this book, I was a bit ambivalent about it, thinking that it would just be a collection of letters. But I really enjoyed it: working out what the links were between the two letters chosen; quite touched by the emotion, often quite repressed, in the older letters that is more openly expressed in the current-day ones; and gaining a sneak peek into the behind-the-scenes life of a famous person. What worked best for me was that it is the perfect book for dipping into, perhaps last thing at night, when you want something to read but don’t want to embark on something lengthy that requires concentration. It’s a very human book, showing communication in an intentional but not self-conscious way in the original letters, and the imagination and emotional sensitivity of the current-day writers in responding to them.
My rating: too difficult to rate, because the letters were all so different. 7/10?
Sourced from: Review copy from NLA via Scott Eathorne, Quickmark Media
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 