POSTSCRIPT: Life, Love and Loss in Australian Letters (National Library of Australia 2026) by various contributors is a moving, tender, curious and enlightening collection of old letters found in the archives, each with a response (inspired by either content, tone or emotion) by a contemporary writer. The effect is a lovely combination of days past, when letters were handwritten and often weeks or even months in the delivery, and today, with instantaneous emails or quirky or heartfelt letters written to loved ones or perhaps even those long dead.
Exploring themes of love, loss, health, politics, the environment, individual rights and responsibilities, creativity and family, each letter says so much about the sender and the receiver. The original older letters are all available for viewing through the National Library archives. The more recent responses are often funny, poignant or nostalgic, as today’s writers read the words of those long gone and react in their own interesting ways.
The original letters include those from Jane Austen, Judith Wright, Henry Lawson, Mem Fox, Neville Bonner and Adela Pankhurst. The respondents include contemporary literary award-winners and social commentators such as Frank Bongiorno, Kate Forsyth, the always hilarious Robert Skinner, Michael Winkler and Maggie Mackellar, to name only a few.
Chosen from millions of archival letters, the original missives evoke times and places long past, with their authors denoting moments of significant national or international importance, world events, social change, or merely the day-to-day minutia of living. Important themes such as relationships and reconciliation are echoed in both the older and newer letters.
One aspect I found particularly interesting is that the original letter writers wrote with only their singular audience in mind – their friend or child, their colleague or sibling. Whereas the modern responses are crafted very much with the view they will be shared widely through the vehicle of this book. Consequently, the earlier letters are often more spontaneous and casual, with less attention to form, but the responses by contemporary authors are thoughtful, well-crafted and designed with a wider audience in mind.
It’s also fascinating how the contemporary writers were each drawn to respond to a specific letter and how often the subjects they chose to write about echoed or aligned with the original missives.
A slim book of treasures, POSTSCRIPT will appeal to anyone who loves epistolary correspondence, history, passionate personal thoughts put on paper, or the lovely symmetry between something penned a hundred years ago or more, and a response composed recently. Fascinating and eerily haunting.