Stamp of approval: holding onto letter-writing’s feelgood factor

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This was published 3 years ago

Stamp of approval: holding onto letter-writing’s feelgood factor

A one-time letter writer, mail sorter and stamp collector reflects on how the art of communicating has changed – and what we’ve lost in the process.

By Alan Attwood

Letters can signify sliding-doors moments. Things change with a single envelope – or the letter never received.

Letters can signify sliding-doors moments. Things change with a single envelope – or the letter never received.Credit: Getty Images

Afew months back I conducted a simple experiment. I posted a letter to a friend living just a 15-minute drive away. She received it on Friday. It took five days for the mail to get through, despite the envelope having a “Priority” sticker. (I know these stickers are redundant, but I had a couple left over, so it seemed worth trying.) Soon afterwards, I read a “Letter to the Editor” from a bloke who’d sent one to himself: the result was similar. And I bet he emailed – not posted – his letter to the Ed.

Conclusions from my experiment: first, it would have been quicker to drop off the letter personally; second, prompt delivery is not a priority anymore. I shouldn’t have been surprised about this, as I’d already got a card from Australia Post. It appeared in the letter box one day, advising, “Your letter delivery schedule is changing.” Those cards went everywhere, telling householders “the way Australians use the post has changed dramatically”.

The number of parcels has soared; so, too, the number of individual addresses (“delivery points” in official language) across the country: now standing at 12.3 million and rising by about 200,000 annually. But the volume of letters fell by 45 per cent between 2008 and 2019 (while the population rose by 20 per cent), meaning it costs more for posties to deliver less. Hence the card advising that letters will now be delivered every second working day, although Express Post items are still a daily service. The card concluded by giving me two options for expressing my views about all this: through the Australia Post website or via mail. I liked the idea of writing a letter to complain about letter deliveries.

Concern about mail is not new. Late in 1960, American essayist E. B. White wrote: “We have a brand-new mail-delivery system in Maine … Instead of letters being sorted in a nearby office, the way they used to be, they are now sorted in the county seat … Many a letter that would formerly have gone a mile or two is now quite well travelled by the time it reaches its destination. If I write a letter to a friend in the village a couple of miles away and drop the letter at the post office that is nearest my house, the letter gets taken all the way to Ellsworth, which is about 25 miles in the wrong direction.”

Like me, White concluded that hand delivery would be more efficient. And he would get some fresh air.

White would have been intrigued by 2020. Which, as we all know, turned out to be a very odd year. The year of face masks and Donald Trump losing gracelessly. Also the year in which mail became controversial. In Australia, it got mixed up with Cartier watches and executive bonuses because of the misadventures of Christine Holgate, former head of Australia Post. In the US, postal ballots became one of Trump’s many scapegoats for the election result.

The pandemic has had a profound impact on mail. Australia Post’s most
recent annual report, released before Holgate’s resignation in November, noted that in April – as lockdowns were implemented – 200,000 Australian households shopped online for the first time. Non-letter revenue increased 15 per cent for Australia Post, which delivered approximately 400 million parcels, including 118 million between April and June.

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Meanwhile, the volume of both domestic and international letters declined by at least 14 per cent in 2019-20. Hence the reduction in delivery frequency and the retraining or diversion of some posties to parcel delivery. One problem, though, is that some popular pandemic items “are too large for a bike or an electric delivery vehicle (eDV)“. Ever tried to balance a flat pack desk or rowing machine on the back of a bike?

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A very weird year. The year in which I read, or re-read, some 19th-century classics while marooned in lockdown in Melbourne. In Charles Dickens’ era, people sent letters about appointments the following day, confident that the information would arrive in time. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the whole Bennet family holds its breath every morning for mail with the latest news after Elizabeth’s foolish younger sister, Lydia, elopes with the cad Mr Wickham. A key plot point in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles concerns a letter not read because of an error in delivery (slipped under the carpet as well as a door).

I have vague memories from a 1960s childhood of the postie coming twice daily. In the mid-1970s, year 12 results were guaranteed to arrive by post on a particular morning. Mail used to be both regular and reliable. Now, less so. Holgate fought a perception that her leadership team was well rewarded for delivering less. Which was unfair, as the total volume of mailed items – including parcels – has rocketed up. It is E. B. White-style letters that have slipped backwards. And White never had to wrestle with tracking numbers in bucolic Maine.

In November 1860, using a relay of Pony Express riders, it took about a week for news of Abraham Lincoln’s election as president to get from the east to west coasts of the US. This was deemed to be remarkable. In 2020, because of Trump’s blizzard of legal challenges to the counting of postal ballots, it took far, far longer for the presidential election result to seem settled. Again, things have gone south.

Letters increasingly seem like the paper equivalent of landline telephones. Who needs them?

Does it matter? Times change. Things are done differently. Australia Post has confronted “the digital disruption of our traditional core business”. Year 12 results now arrive by text, and if Austen were writing Pride and Prejudice today she’d have the Bennet family using a “Lydia Missing” WhatsApp group.

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Letters are so … yesterday. And the beginning of the end was the coming of email. The first service I ever used was AOL, in 1995, with its catchy “You’ve Got Mail!” (though not as we’d known it). Letters increasingly seem like the paper equivalent of landline telephones. Who needs them?

But for every gain there is a loss. Will anyone ever edit, annotate and publish collected emails instead of letters? Hillary Clinton’s email server controversy suggests not. The effort required to compose something on paper can aid eloquence. Consider John Keats’ last letter, penned in 1820 while mortally ill, aged 25: “I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.” These days, a languishing poet could send a stoic thumbs-up emoji.

The volume of both domestic and international letters declined by at least 14 per cent in 2019-20.

The volume of both domestic and international letters declined by at least 14 per cent in 2019-20.Credit: Getty Images

Letters can signify sliding-doors moments. Things change with a single envelope, or (poor Tess) the letter never received. Letters matter, and not just because of their ubiquity in popular culture: everything from Please Mr Postman to the first lines of Clancy of the Overflow. But here, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should reveal a conflict of interest: late in 1974, when people still sent lots and lots of Christmas cards, I was employed by the post office as a night mail-sorter.

Starting around 9pm, and going through until 6am in the back room of a cavernous delivery centre, we’d work our way through piles and piles of envelopes, sorting them into pigeonholes, one for each local street. The radio was tuned to a Top 40 station, which meant that after a few hours the same songs came around again – and there are only so many times you want to hear Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.

Had I been a few years younger there would have been another bonus to this mail-sorting: checking out the stamps. For I was once – another confession – a collector. But the last stamps in my Australian album, costing just seven cents each, commemorated Christmas 1971. The following year I stopped collecting. Partly because it was getting expensive keeping up with new releases; mainly because girls had started to seem more interesting than, say, a series of bicentenary stamps from 1970 featuring Captain Cook. Money saved on stamps could be spent on LPs. It’s no coincidence that 1972, the year I abandoned philately, was when I bought my first records: Slade Alive! and Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick (an unlikely double).

Record albums replaced stamp albums, but I still have them. If I flick through them now, when so much mail is simply labelled Postage Paid, I’m embarrassed by stamps from Yemen and Romania and Mongolia, places that produced the philatelic equivalent of gobstoppers: big and garish and sickly sweet. But others tell a story.

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There are butterfly stamps from Papua New Guinea, because my father once worked there and later corresponded with colleagues. Plenty of stamps from the UK (without a country name, just the profile of the Queen), where my family comes from. Stamps with the portrait of King George VI from colonial-era Nyasaland, later to become Malawi. My maternal grandfather – Henry Butters, always known to me as Pop – worked there as a British civil servant in the late 1940s.

He’s the one who showed me the power of letters. We shared correspondence between 1967, the year I turned 10, and 1985, when he died. A steady succession of light-blue aerogrammes bounced back and forwards between Melbourne and Stirling, Scotland. Mine were handwritten, his thumped out on a manual typewriter. I shared with him things I never discussed with parents. Letters had the privacy of a confessional. He wouldn’t always respond directly to things I raised (girl issues, then career queries) other than recommending making the best of a bad thing. But I never doubted he was listening to me.

We chatted, but both understood we communicated more freely in letters.

I visited him several times: in 1972, on a family trip, my mother seeing her parents for the first time in 11 years; then in 1980-81, my year away backpacking. He was of that generation of men more comfortable wearing a tie every day. His manner was gruff; his opinions firm; he added a splash of sherry to his soup, which helps explain why he snored in a comfy chair after lunch. We chatted, but both understood we communicated more freely in letters.

As financial secretary for the Hong Kong government, it was Pop’s signature (H.R. Butters) on the bank notes when the Japanese invaded in 1941. Having ensured his wife and children, including my mother, had been resettled in Canada, he spent the remainder of the war in the Stanley Internment Camp. Like so many former prisoners of war, he never talked about his war experience. But I found a couple of wry references in his letters, such as one describing his “four years with the Japanese”.

He also alluded once to the overstocked pantry in his Stirling home: “On a money programme on TV yesterday one expert, when asked what was the best buy for 1971, produced a tin of meat and suggested that everyone should lay in a stock of tins – they were bound to appreciate! I always have a lot of tins of soup etc. I suppose as a reminder of my years of starvation in internment. So I laughed.”

I keep one of his signed Hong Kong banknotes in a book of English poetry he
gave to me after a visit; a book he’d got as a prize for languages at Glasgow High School in 1912. I also have, somewhere, a bundled pile of his letters. Including the last one, from late 1984. He was tired and had run out of things to say: “I am now 86 and it is no fun … I hope you are well and progressing favourably in all your avocations.” I’ve never known anyone else to use that word.

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Perhaps there are still young people writing letters to grandparents on the other side of the world. But I suspect modern correspondence is conducted by emails or Zoom. If Pop were still alive, I’d tell him about a positive initiative by Australia Post: a G’Day and Hello stamp series, encouraging people to write letters. (“When we connect, we feel better”) The idea is to buy two stamps: one for the envelope; the other to go inside, so the recipient can write back. Cute – although it betrays a suspicion that most people don’t have any stamps at home.

I’m confident my aunt will get my card in fewer than 28 days. Actually, make that reasonably confident.

This promotion of letter writing is admirable. But it’s for Australia only; not suitable for the card I sent to my mother’s 91-year-old sister, Jennifer, in Glasgow not long ago. As a former mail-sorter and stamp collector, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t take any notice of the stamp I’d placed on the envelope until just before I posted it.

Costing $3.20, it commemorated the centenary of airmail between the UK and Australia. That first flight set out on November 12, 1919 and arrived on December 10. Whatever brickbats are handed out to Australia Post today, services have improved since then. I’m confident my aunt will get my card in fewer than 28 days. Actually, make that reasonably confident. And if she’s feeling up to it, she will reply with some tart comments about Scottish weather and the idiots in charge in Westminster.

Every year, Aunt Jennifer can be relied upon to send me a picturesque Scotland calendar. Which explains why I’ve been left uneasy about another recent notification from Australia Post – this one by email: “Since our last update, your parcel has hit congestion in our delivery network and unfortunately it isn’t going to arrive by the estimated delivery date. We apologise.”

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