Writing Letters A Dying Skill

Illawarra Mercury

Tuesday April 1, 2008

Keeli Cambourne

YOU'VE got mail! It doesn't sound that exciting, really, but last week I got the kind of mail I am not used to getting.

For the first time in years I got a handwritten letter. It was only one page long, from my grandmother, wishing us all a happy Easter. But when the kids saw this particular envelope didn't have a typed address or sticky label on the front, they were very excited to find out what it was.

It's not very often we get anything except bills and flyers in the letterbox, so they knew this must be something special.

Letter writing is a dying skill. With the advent of email and text messaging, there is no need to sit down with pen and paper and compose a well-structured piece of prose to your nearest and dearest.

Now you can just type in a couple of lines, punch the send key and it's across the planet or around the corner in seconds.

I have a friend overseas now and it's not unusual for me to fire her off an email a few times a week. Which is great, but it can lack that personal touch of a hand-written letter.

When I was travelling 20 years ago, writing letters home was a weekly task. The thin blue aeromail envelopes didn't have that much space to wax lyrically about what you were up to, but writing them always made me feel more connected to home.

My grandmother got out her box of treasures the other day and inside were letters and cards, some more than 90 years old, which she had saved.

There was a card she received when she was three from an uncle, and letters from the time my grandfather was fighting in Singapore in World War II.

My mother also has a bunch of letters - from my dad, her college friends and a special photo album with anecdotes written by her father explaining some of the things he did with her before he went off to the war. He died when my mother was only a toddler, which makes these little notes so much more important.

My own box of memorabilia is sadly lacking in any letters. The only hand-written treasure I have from my husband is a poem he wrote to me on Valentine's Day which is stuck on the fridge, and it is far from romantic.

It got me wondering about how future generations will ever get to know about their ancestors when most communication is now stored only in the memory banks of our multitude of electronic devices.

How many of us save the emails we're sent by lovers or friends. If the recent expose of the Wollongong City Council electronic mail system is anything to go by, many of those saucy missives are probably not fit for the eyes and ears of the general population.

And who, apart from the many conquests of Shane Warne, actually save the text messages they receive every day on their mobile phones?

Are biographies of the future going to have to rely on the skills of technological boffins to infiltrate the hard drives of our computers? And if they find missing links from long buried emails, will they offer any insight into what was really going on or just a series of one-liners that don't make sense to anyone but the person for whom they were intended?

I know my own emailing will illuminate nothing about my life and the generations that come after me are going to have to rely on old school reports, these columns and baby teeth I've put away in my glory box.

Oh, and of course that lovely poem still stuck on the fridge.

Keeli Cambourne is a South Coast journalist and mother of three trying to find a perfect life-work balance.

© 2008 Illawarra Mercury

Back to News Index | Back to Home