Jack Berne was helping clear out his family’s rusting storage shed when he came across the letters his mother wrote when she was his age. “My mum’s old letters were to her friends. That was kind of a shock to me that’s how they communicated – she’d drop it off in a letterbox.”
He found the colourful letters, with drawings and bubble writing, had a much more personal touch than the texts he sent friends.
Ever since that discovery two years ago, the year 9 student on Sydney’s northern beaches has taken the time to send handwritten letters to his old primary school friend who moved interstate, as well as letters to friends on their birthdays.
But he’s in the minority. The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, says 97% of Australia’s letters are being sent by business and government.
The government released a discussion paper on the future of Australia Post this week, which could spell an end to its obligation to provide daily letter deliveries.
It reported a $190m loss in its letter business over a six-month period, with the “unstoppable decline” expected to make letters a peripheral form of communication by 2030.
As an enthusiastic letter writer – sending about 10 a week – Jennifer King says she finds the news “devastating”.
“It’s just an indicator of the way the whole world is just in a bloody great rush. I don’t know what we’re all rushing about for,” she says.
For King, letter writing is a way to slow down and be mindful. She doesn’t like email and being swamped by a “bulging” inbox. But her biggest incentive is the “buzz” she knows it brings her friends receiving her letters.
“It’s like the ultimate ‘I’m thinking of you’. I’m taking time out of my day to show you I really care and I think people need to know that somebody cares about them,” she says.
“I don’t receive anywhere near as many as I send. That’s not the point. For me it’s not about receiving, it’s about giving. It’s a gift. You’re giving a bit of yourself every time you write a letter.”
King admits letter writing is time-consuming, expensive and at times intimidating.
“I think what really stumps people – they go, what do I write about? People have no idea how interesting they are.”
King, who works as an obituary writer (including for Guardian Australia) after a career in nursing, says people tend to think there is nothing exciting about their own life, “but actually, everybody’s got a story”.
Children’s author Morris Gleitzman believes “if one had the time to read every letter that one human being has written to another over the centuries, it would be an incredible compendium of human stories, the sorts of stories that don’t get published as official stories to be shared”.
“I think there’s something super special about a handwritten letter and the more we communicate through our devices, the more precious I think everything that handwritten letter represents has become,” Gleitzman says.
In contrast to an account of a holiday that may be copied and pasted in an email to many friends, with a handwritten letter, “there is a sense that it is just for us”, he says.
Gleitzman believes the physical letterbox can also become an alternative to the confusion of its digital counterpart, where “the personal and the corporate and the authoritarian and the marketplace is all blended up together”.
The figures from Australia Post show mail volumes hit a high point in 2007-08 before the global financial crisis, and the surge in popularity of text messaging and public webmail services.
However, the pandemic might have pushed against the trend. Covid lockdowns not only sparked a revival in baking sourdough bread and learning to crochet, they also inspired what has become Australia’s largest network of pen pals.
Mea Campbell’s grandfather had passed away two years earlier, but she couldn’t help but think how lonely he would have been had restrictions meant her family was unable to visit him in his nursing home.
Campbell realised the only way to help Australians who might not have access to the internet was to turn back to handwritten letters. Nearly 50,000 Australians have signed up to become pen pals through Campbell’s Letterbox Project, set up to combat loneliness in vulnerable people in aged care homes and with disabilities.
While the older cohort of the project love revisiting the handwritten letter, younger people who sign up as their pen pals enjoy the discovery of the medium, Campbell says.
“The way it works is you might imagine the community is a circle and one half of the community are really vulnerable and isolated and the other half also want connection and to do something good.”
Through the project, a Thor-loving seven-year-old boy with terminal brain cancer has received personal correspondence from Chris Hemsworth. When one woman who had been communicating with a man in a nursing home for two years heard he was in palliative care, she rushed to scribble down a final letter containing Cole Porter’s poem Don’t Fence Me In, which was read out to him in hospital.
Campbell herself has received a call from Australia Post when it received an envelope that read “Mea Campbell. Lawyer. Dubbo.”
When Campbell opened the envelope, it contained a napkin with a plea from a woman in a dementia ward to be part of the project. She had seen a segment about the Letterbox Project on television and tried to remember what she could about Campbell in order to get in touch.
Campbell says thousands of touching stories come through the letters each week.
The people who sign up to become pen pals are extremely diverse, she says, but in the end “people just want connection and they want to feel visible and they want to feel valued”.
“It’s a way for people to feel like they’re really valued, because it’s not just an email that someone’s done. It actually takes time and effort to send a letter, even the most basic letter.”
For King, letters transcend the everyday correspondence of email and become records of personal history.
She still has the letter her father wrote to Santa Claus asking for a bicycle during the Great Depression, a letter from her great-grandmother dating from 1920 and an aerogram her grandmother sent her mother six days after King was born.
“A letter is there for ever. And the email will eventually be deleted from your mailbox, you know, but I’ve still got my first birthday card from my grandma, who died 20 years ago, so I can look at that, I can bring it out and I can see her handwriting.”
For King the idea of the letter disappearing by 2030 is “beyond belief” when they have been a part of society for hundreds of years.
“The first letter ever written was believed to be in 500BC, by Queen Atossa of Persia. That was 500 years before the birth of Christ. I mean, my God and now they’re going to dump letters. Are you kidding me? You can’t. They’re part of life, they’re part of the world.”
