Correspondence Rules

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the practice of writing became rapidly democratised, and letter-writing lay at the heart of this great writing explosion. The new writing bulimia involved all social classes, and not only the educated elite and those who aspired to join it. The ‘writing revolution’ of the last decades of the nineteenth century was largely a letter-writing revolution, and two major events gave it a special impetus. One was the First World War, with which this book is not directly concerned, and the other was the mass exodus of emigrants from Europe to the Americas and Australia, with which it is very closely concerned.

Epistolary correspondence is a highly coded medium. It has its own conventions and rituals which need to be elucidated if its significance is to be fully understood. The rules of social interaction in a letter governed the quality of the paper chosen, the colour of the ink, the layout of the page, and the correct degree of deference or familiarity permitted in addressing one's recipient. Unwritten rules also determined how the reciprocal obligations of the correspondents would be played out. The discussion of love letters below analyses how two correspondents fulfilled, and occasionally forgot, the tacit epistolary pact which ruled their exchange of letters.

Emigrants’ correspondence and love letters form the main subject – matter of this chapter. I draw on 13 collections of letters, some published, other preserved in manuscript, transcript or microfilm in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Some corpuses are very small, like the three surviving letters of English labourer Benjamin Boyce1; others are much more substantial, like the Cooper family's epistolary of 381 letters (see Deep Dive 3).

About the Decision to Enter Politics

Patricia A. Pingry, author of the book about Jerry Falwell, was asked: “How can it be that one person, who holds the answer for the nation's redemption, manages to convince people to surrender to GOD?” She answers that Falwell, a man who believed in GOD when he founded a church in an old bottle factory with 35 devotees, and since then, it has grown to 17,000 followers by 1980; a man who turned a 30-minute radio program into the most-watched televangelist program in the world; and a man who turned a college with a meager student body into a large university—never doubted how it should be done. Falwell is quoted saying:

Turning the screw of complacent middle-class individualism in a latter-day settler colony we read John Seymour's (1978) Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, a large-scale coffee-table bible of autonomy on speed Escape from the rat race into your rustic rural idyll Ignore the arms race by growing cabbages Walk into the page with its sepia pen-drawings of small-holdings viewed from above on a quarter-page No rural poverty here to stain the picture nor pinch of scarcity to spoil the scenery I once read that Seymour himself couldn't live completely self-sufficiently off his own West-Wales property in a Britain still basking in imperial derring-do in the Falklands not to mention the long keel-haul of Northern Ireland but only from the sales of his books purveying a fallacious self-sufficiency autonomy per se, independence, one we imagined from our corner of the lucky country we read The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency from a rural farm-holidays retreat in Western Victoria in a colonial farmhouse built by settler pastoralists lying on the threadbare Axminster carpet in front of a grandiose Victorian fireplace where iron-hard chunks of redgum we’d chopped behind the shearing shed would burn deep into the night A Grampians-(not-quite)-look-alike that had yet to remember itself as Gariwerd and was still happily oblivious to the massacres that so long obliterated that name, those ancestors, from local memory

In an age of unprecedented information access, the discovery of overlooked historical narratives becomes all the more remarkable. Dr. Kobby Barda's scholarship stands as just such an achievement—unearthing crucial yet forgotten connections that illuminate our present moment.

Where others have relied on assumptions about Evangelical-Jewish relations, Dr. Barda approached his research with extraordinary objectivity and scholarly persistence. What emerged from his meticulous investigation was not merely isolated historical fragments, but a rich tapestry revealing the depth and complexity of a once-unimaginable alliance: the profound friendship between hundreds of millions of Christians and the Jewish people worldwide.

By opening this new scholarly domain, Dr. Barda has revealed compelling narratives that demonstrate how Jewish-Christian relations have fundamentally shaped both modern Israel and America during its period of global preeminence. His initial discoveries provided the catalyst for my own doctoral research, allowing me to further develop crucial aspects of this historical relationship.

My life's work centers on transforming Jewish-Christian relations—particularly regarding the hundreds of millions of Christian Zionists—from sentimental goodwill into substantive partnership. In this mission, Dr. Barda's research proves invaluable. We must acknowledge uncomfortable truths: Jewish communities often question Christian motivations, while Christians frequently fail to recognize how history justifes such wariness. Yet Dr. Barda reveals that we stand at the threshold of a new era in this relationship.

“The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the twentieth-century was a mere gust compared with the hurricane that is coming.” In making this assertion on October 3, 2023, former UK home secretary Suella Braverman did not hesitate to embed climate alongside migration invasion metaphors in repeated assertions aimed at heightening anxiety around global population movement patterns.

‘Sheer Joy in the Sound’

We cannot fully comprehend the rich literary culture of the nineteenth century without acknowledging the supreme importance of poetry within it. Poetry mattered. For the readers surveyed here, that is to say those reading generations up to and contemporary with the First World War, poetry was perhaps the most prestigious form of literature. Whether we consider the English Romantics, their successors or native-born Australian poets, poets enjoyed a cultural influence that clearly distinguished the long nineteenth century from today's obsession with the novel. Poetry, wrote Mary Fullerton reminiscing about her childhood, ‘was the first music I knew’ and, as a 16-year-old, she enjoyed reading Shelley in her family's plum orchard. Randolph Bedford's father ‘talked poetry as if he loved the music more than the sense’. A wide range of verse was available in the numerous anthologies which appeared in the second half of the century. Henry Handel Richardson found A Thousand Gems of British Poetry on her father's bookshelves, and

it became my inseparable companion. I raked it from end to end, I declaimed it and sang from it; and by the time we parted, on my going to school, it was on its last legs, tattered, dog-eared and black with finger marks.

She abandoned the book in 1883, aged 12, when she left for the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne.

Telling John about our evolving plan for a trip to South Africa for Tatjana's PhD graduation – her and the kids’ first return since our departure six years earlier – I am prompted to promise him a piece about the jacarandas. As soon as I mentioned the Pretoria jacarandas we so loved, with their raucously squalling hadedas making a racket high up among the purple blossoms, he talks about the jacarandas in Perth's leafy suburbs – places he always tried to avoid, he says. Jacarandas on almost symmetrically opposed sides of the Indian Ocean, yet for us asymmetrically positioned in terms of the affect they evoke.

Jacarandas, everywhere one turns. I often remember the jacaranda in a friend's front garden just opposite Lloyd Street Primary School, the 1920s red-brick school, a model of those all over the country at the same period, that I attended in the early 1970s – and my father in the 1940s. Revisiting the old school at the cusp of the new year 2020 with my brother, a few days after my mother's funeral, I can locate the house, but find the jacaranda gone.

In Johannesburg, a year or two back, myself a guest in South Africa now rather than a temporary native, I host my friends from Brazil, thinking I can play the tour guide by presenting the almost iridescent jacarandas in Melville. Fernando and Roberto are delighted: Roberto says that Johannesburg really reminds him of São Paulo, and Fernando says: I know the jacarandas from home, from Bello Horizonte, where I grew up, but ours are yellow, not purple.

Which version of a story are we being privileged to hear? Which version is this? And told with what emphasis, what distractions, what purpose? What are the agendas behind its telling? Milton’s Samson Agonistes is naturally a piece of propaganda. But why and how? Well, in my pacifist reversioning of the work, it is intertextually retold. The narrative is similar if the scene-setting both more generic and more specific. This is a tale of conflicted belief, values and desires. It is a paradox in which other paradoxes multiply. It attempts to undo ownership, nation, systems of control, the primacy of the human over nature and especially militarism. It is a pacifist text in which dispossessions are confronted. It is a pacifist text in which denials and exclusions are confronted. It advocates equality, egalitarianism, gender liberation, gender justice, a flexibility of identity and respect for different belief systems. The story is told – Samson, destroyer of an army, is blinded and enslaved. He considers his position in conversation with his father, with others of his community, and with his wife Dalila whom he blames for his downfall, the robbing of his strength (embodied in his hair, which is dead cells) through betrayal. But Samson’s bonding with ‘the other’, the ‘foreign’, is also a path to fairness and justice.

The Drive for Biblical Literacy

About 180,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and 1875. Chapter 2 suggested that about half of them had at least a rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing, and that another 20–25 per cent could read but not write. They belonged to an ‘amphibious culture’, as Marina Roggero expressed it, in which oral transmission was as important as print communication, and they moved between oral and print cultures as the need arose. They spoke a language of their own – a criminal argot which outsiders needed an interpreter to understand. As transportees, however, they entered a colonial society which was highly regulated by the printed word. As historian Alan Atkinson emphasised, colonial Australia was shaped and governed by writing. Prisoners were absorbed and regulated by a ‘pen-and-paper culture’, as colonial settlement reached ‘the apotheosis of writing’. The convicts’ immersion in this highly bureaucratised world began on arrival when they were individually asked to provide information on their age, trade, religion, marital status, the number of their children if any, their criminal history, hair colour, height, weight and general appearance, as well as answer questions about their literacy competence. From here on, they were under close surveillance.

Not only were convicts described, identified and classified in writing, but they were also subjected to an evangelical onslaught in print designed both to Christianise and educate them in the lessons of Holy Scripture.

Daily life is a succession of informal rituals. Go visit your own imaginary day, and I’ll be your witness. The bed in which you sleep, alone or in company, is a ritualistic territory that encompasses two worlds and many countries: the world of day and the world of night, the countries of rest, renewal, dreams, agitation, intimacy, insomnia, past, present, and future. You wake up, or you fnd yourself awake; this in itself is a rite of passage, banal, ordinary, but a rite of passage nevertheless: you pass from night to day, from receptive subconsciousness to acquisitive consciousness, from no goals to goals.

Homework: Ritualize your bedroom, your bed, and your sleep.

Cofee or tea, it doesn't matter; preparing the drink is ritualistic, the cup is talismanic. Every object exists in the material domain and in the symbolic domain. Your mug might be a cheap one from the dollar store, but it's the child of Cup: the archetype of vessels and containers, of bowls and steins, of goblets and chalices. Perhaps you don't see your mug as the child of Cup. But it’d break your heart if you accidentally broke it; and it’d really, really upset you if someone else broke it. And when you hold the cup that holds the liquid, you receive—from the cup and the liquid, and from your hands and fngers— a sort of kaleidoscopic, magnetized memory of every cup you’ve ever touched and every cofee or tea you’ve ever drunk.

In my student days, I met a sensitive Argentinian my age who told me something I’ll never forget. He had grown up in a conservative religious household. From as far back as he could remember, he had been trained to walk close to the buildings out in the street, rather than in the middle of the sidewalk or near the curb; and to walk with his head down, his eyes on the ground. If he walked upright and in the middle of the sidewalk, head high and eyes alert to the world, God would think that the young man was occupying too much space and was being presumptuous and disrespectful, and he (the young man) should expect to be punished.

Within our distinct cultures, we’re permanently engaged in a dynamic play of opposing forces, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes awkwardly. My wife is taller than average. Years ago, a creative learning situation led her to a sudden realization: “I have the right to occupy all of my space!” Until then, she had unconsciously strived to make herself smaller due to implicit family and societal pressures. There followed a demanding process of recalibration and regrowth, which was by no means pain-free. A friend of mine, also taller than average, once shared something similar and yet quite diferent. He told me that people often equated height with strength, which made it harder for family, friends, and strangers to recognize the emotional vulnerability that he carried within. As a result, he had long felt misunderstood and unseen. He admitted that, given a choice, he would prefer to be shorter.

Iron-feathered to the magnetic trees, splintering in from what to me will now always be known as the ‘Horb end’ of the island – Horb am Neckar through which the water chills between forest hills

and the mallard tries to ride then slow the winter flow – from that end, Black Forest End, the rooks come in – one thousand and nine of them crowning plane trees, raining shit far down onto the muddy paths, but not raucous, no way! just emphatic

in their bedding-down arrangements – their roosting epiphanies, from that end of the island to the far end (i.e. furthest from Horb) which is point to point other than the tangent to a low-walled circle semi-circumnavigated near a centre,

a straight line other than circumlocutions around puddles and at a jag to nightfalling conspiracies of smokers – from one end of the island to the other, and across the Old Town-side's waters, the Hölderlinturm finally unshrouded, with Liszt playing

his demi-soaring brief heavenly appendage to the Divine Comedy in my headshell, the rooks rocking the platanenallee, insisting this is recovery and this is purchase above & beyond catastrophe, declaring the skeletons of trees will last long

enough to decide what best to do with toxic dawns, the rising and stretching of wings, the exercising of beaks and claws, the opportunities of day even as far upriver as Horb, a midlife still clinging to cold in heated times, leafless & carbon always.

—JK

Having just been quoted out of context so my position of anti-appropriation which I took on from the earliest days of my writing – for example, not co-opting Noongar stories in The Silo (Kinsella 1997; 2022b, 190–245) but referring to the crime of dispossession in one small poem that then shifts or tilts the entire focus of the work so that it is (re)considered in that light, through that lens, in terms of that crime. Today I wake to read an article wherein I am quoted as defending another poet who appropriated Noongar language without permission. This is my response to the journal and author (who, to give him credit, acknowledges the misuse and is seeking to rectify it):

[…] i would ask this is corrected immediately!!!! it is wrong and deeply offensive to me. thanks.

Later this morning, I wrote an email to a writer friend of Noongar heritage:

strange to be cited out of context to illustrate something one opposes! […] my point was that [the author] was as much ‘western australian’ at the time as any of us from the invader cultural intrusion.

further, there's so often a blurring of ‘people’ and ‘culture’ by (some) colonial writers – many ‘white’ writers not being able to see having a character narratively ‘perform’/’behave’ culture is appropriation whereas having a character who is not white ‘acting’ as ‘people’ in an ‘everyday’ sense as all humans do is a different thing.

How you defne the notion of strength will predetermine how you use your hands, wrists, and fngers.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was an American architect, inventor, and visionary. Like all visionaries, he had many ideas that were too far ahead of his time; ideas that seemed good and wonderful but were impossible to put into practice; and foolish and crazy ideas, too. But some of his ideas were given durable shape. He was interested in geodesic domes: hemispherical structures constructed with lattices of rigid triangular elements. Many such domes have been built around the world as auditoriums, greenhouses, sports arenas, storage facilities, and public art. Geodesic domes are surprisingly strong and stable structures, and they can withstand heavy loads relative to their size (Figure 11.1).

Explaining how it works would leave most of us confused and discouraged, besides not being necessary for our purposes. Instead, let's fast-forward from Buckminster Fuller to structural strength to tensegrity, which is an abbreviation of tensional integrity. Tensegrity, or a harmony of tensions, is one of the reasons why a geodesic dome is strong and stable. It appears that Buckminster Fuller himself coined the term in 1955, though sometimes it's said that the sculptor Kenneth Snelson (1927–2016), who studied with Fuller in the 1940s, is the term's conceptual godfather.