In July 1839 a young man wrote a letter home to Fife, Scotland from his house on the “Yarra Yarra River, Melbourne, Port Phillip”. Paper was scarce, so he utilised one of the many paper-saving techniques of the time: cross-writing horizontally, vertically and diagonally to fill two large leaves of heavy paper with words that would later add up to forty pages of typed transcription.
The young man, James Graham, was writing home to his father for the first time in many months, and the first few paragraphs of his letter are testimony to the scarcity and value of news from home. “Nine months passed away without receiving the least intelligence”, he wrote, “an awful and lonely feeling of being forgotten [stole] over my mind”.
Dr Katherine Ellinghaus is the Hansen Lecturer in History, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include transnational and comparative history, colonial history and interracial relationships.
One Comment
Max Thomas
June 17, 2018 at 12:58 pm
Thank you Katherine for an interesting, albeit sad account of this less heroic aspect of our history. I was especially interested in your remarks about James Graham using one of the many paper-saving techniques of his time. It reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s wonderful poems written on used envelopes, not only to save precious paper, but to have the reader discover the almost ‘geometric’ forms of her work.
I’m sure you’ll know that Emily grew up with and became a lifelong correspondent with Helen Hunt Jackson, the American Indigenous rights activist. In 1881, Helen published “A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some Indian Tribes” which is an account that bears an awful similarity to what you have outlined here.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” Are we not now living through the realization of that prediction and struggling to reinforce those shaky foundations?
Max Thomas
June 17, 2018 at 12:58 pm
Thank you Katherine for an interesting, albeit sad account of this less heroic aspect of our history. I was especially interested in your remarks about James Graham using one of the many paper-saving techniques of his time. It reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s wonderful poems written on used envelopes, not only to save precious paper, but to have the reader discover the almost ‘geometric’ forms of her work.
I’m sure you’ll know that Emily grew up with and became a lifelong correspondent with Helen Hunt Jackson, the American Indigenous rights activist. In 1881, Helen published “A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some Indian Tribes” which is an account that bears an awful similarity to what you have outlined here.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” Are we not now living through the realization of that prediction and struggling to reinforce those shaky foundations?