The National Library of Australia holds millions of letters in its collections in Canberra. You can call them up - in neat, occasionally beribboned folders housed in sturdy, acid-free boxes - to be delivered to the library's reading room.
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You can sit in that hushed room - with the recently acquired oversized brass bust of Richard Bonynge silently watching - and read letters written by or to eminent and everyday Australians; letters that talk about significant moments in history, letters where someone is pouring their heart out or demanding an answer or sending condolences or wishing good health or asking a favour or coolly imparting a business decision.
You can, in the letters, trace the research of a historian or map the web of literary friendships between our greatest writers. You can sense the great need for - and read of the ongoing work towards - reconciliation.
You can see the beginnings of love, and the terrible end of relationships. You can read about death, about work, about family.
The letters the library collects tell the story of the nation by telling the stories of millions of individual moments.
Letters have a unique power (potent still in faxes and emails, even if not quite the same) as a form of communication.
They bridge the distance of place and time, showing the recipient that someone is thinking about them, however tender or important that thought.
Intended, usually, for a singular audience, the writer has time to compose their words deliberately.
The almost-Reverend John Flynn took an hour to write just 261 of them to his father on the eve of his 30th birthday.
His letter was one of the first that we knew we would include in our book Postscript: Love, Life and Loss in Australian Letters.
It is incredibly specific to him and that moment in time - two months shy of being ordained, about to move to Beltana in outback South Australia for his first posting - but in his yearning to live up to his father's expectations there is something powerfully universal.
There were moments of concern in the selection process about finding the best letters. Was that going to be letters written by the most famous Australians? The most life-changing letters? The most emotional?
We certainly didn't have the time (surely decades, and even then, how to keep pace with newly acquired material?) or the number of researchers to read every single letter in the collection.
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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.
Beyond John Flynn's letter of gratitude to his father, the book contains missives from people such as Barbara Blackman, Adela Pankhurst, Senator Neville Bonner, Bill Gammage, Henry Lawson, Kylie Tennant and Judith Wright.
The library's vast collections, while rooted firmly in Australian culture and history, do contain letters with significance beyond our shores, including by Charles Dickens (to his son Alfred, who had emigrated to Australia five years earlier), Mark Twain (to a naturalist named Jack with a poem about Australia's unique fauna) and Jane Austen.
Austen's letter has little to do with Australia; she wrote it while in Bath to her sister at Steventon, her family's village in Hampshire.
![A 1921 letter written by Henry Lawson, a year before his death: "Dear Roberta, The trouble is, when we get a drink or two, we think [we] are capable of Noble Deeds - and let it go at that."](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/vuJmMAkyxKfBpiJqjiHTXS/2690d1d1-9f7e-4803-bb0a-cc7fad74ca9b.jpg/r0_859_1448_2118_w576_h298_fmax.webp "A 1921 letter written by Henry Lawson, a year before his death: \"Dear Roberta, The trouble is, when we get a drink or two, we think [we] are capable of Noble Deeds - and let it go at that.\"")
It was later acquired by Edward August Petherick, a bookseller and collector whose material came into the national collection in 1909, and so is housed at the NLA in Canberra. We know it's not strictly an Australian letter, but we couldn't resist its inclusion.
Her letter has something in common with the faxes between Mem Fox and Morris Gleitzman. Austen references First Impressions, which had been rejected for publication a year earlier, and would later be published as Pride and Prejudice.
Fox and Gleitzman discuss Possum Magic and Worry Warts, both classics of Australian children's literature.
Two hundred years have passed, but both exchanges give a new reader the same electric tingle of sneaking a glance into the private concerns of beloved authors, of seeing behind the publishing curtain.
It was that thrill of revelation that I was hoping our modern authors would find as they joined the project. And by and by, it happened.
Some writers took a little time to find the right letters, others seized on one quickly. They were asked then to write a new letter, addressed to whomever they liked (real or imagined), somehow inspired by the original letter from the library's collections.
Our modern letter writers include Kate Forsyth, David Brooks, Michael Winkler, Amy Remekis, Barrina South, Sam Wallman and more.
Almost all of our respondents wrote to someone they knew. Most of them, despite working from such different starting letters, wrote to someone they love, to parents or children.
Dual impulses for our modern writers were also by and by revealed - to understand and make sense of the past, or to somehow shape the future. In this, they were echoing the values that are at the very heart of the National Library of Australia.
We hope that Postscript: Love, Life and Loss in Australian Letters will bring readers similar moments of reflection and realisation, and then inspire them to write their own Australian letter.
Who knows? Maybe it will end up in the collections of your national library, to be plucked out for some future anthology.
- Lauren Smith is the publisher at the National Library of Australia. She is the editor of the new book Postscript (NLA Publishing, $26.99) which curates a selection of the millions of historic letters held by the NLA and invites contemporary Australian writers to contribute new letters inspired by them. The first letter Lauren ever sent was a note slid under her parents' bedroom door and the last letter she sent was to her goddaughter during the pandemic, which contained a uniquely terrible illustration of a unicorn.
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