A Book of Letters



In the age of the internet and iPhones, of Skype and email, It seems hard to believe that 30 years ago, when I left home and moved to Australia, there were only two ways to communicate; you wrote letters, or you phoned. 
And in those days, long distance phone calls were still expensive. A short call might cost $14 or more; and that was real money back then! 

 At 21 I had moved from New Zealand to Australia; a little over three hours by plane. I wasn’t a great communicator; but I usually spoke by phone with either my parents, sister or grandmother at least a couple of times a month. And occasionally I would write a letter. 

 While I was a lousy correspondent, my father started writing to me weekly. 
For the first few months, the letters were occassional, with my mother often writing the first part of the letter, and my father finishing it, or vice versa. By the second year my father had taken over the writing duties while my mother would proof-read the letters; correcting any errors and sometimes adding a question or comment at the end. 

 My mother says that Dad had read that if you want to keep doing something, you need to do it on a regular schedule. Each Sunday he writes a letter. These letters were first written on aerogrammes, and then, when he acquired a computer, and became comfortable with it, they became typed, two-page affairs. 
Pretty much the only times he misses a letter are if I am visiting there, or when they were visiting here. 

 I have over 1500 letters for a total of over 1,400,000 words.

 Some time ago I thought about assembling the letters into some sort of book. This required first loading all the letters into the computer using OCR, typing and voice recognition. It took a surprisingly long time to do this. Once I had most of the letters in computer readable form, it was a process of editing, messaging and cutting.

 This book attempts to take the best stories and anecdotes from those letters and condense them into a record of the correspondence that others might enjoy.


 Though, as my daughter said after I told her I had sent dad a proof copy of the book, “You’ve essentially mailed his letters back to him!” 

 Amazon: Letters From New Zealand: Farming, Fishing and Golf

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