Mail Out
ALPHA MAIL
(Has the habit of envelope-and-stamp been permanently licked by text and email?)
(c) David Astle, 2006
Q: What sits in the corner and travels all round the world?
A: A stamp.
Tell that joke to primary-schoolers and see how far you get. Believe me, Grade 4 can be a tough crowd. While the riddle isn’t gold, the wordplay once made sense to a nine-year-old brain. Before our universe turned electronic, things like stamps and envelopes registered on the radar. Years ago, when records had grooves and airlines had ashtrays, people posted letters.
History is rich in correspondence, from Paul’s epistles to Cyrano’s billet doux. “More than kisses,” wrote the poet John Donne, in a letter 400 years back, “letters mingle souls.” A lofty notion, though it seems these days the soul-mingling gig, at least on paper, is largely enjoyed by Santa Claus, c/ South Pole.
Every December the big guy will score a sack of pen-and-ink demands. Just as Granny may get a crayon card on her 80th birthday, but that’s pretty much the letter-writing output of your average Australian child. Correction: your average Australian. Or so it seems.
Young or old, urban or outback, we barely send letters any more. Why bother licking the Queen when a quick email will do the trick? Who needs to raid the stationery closet when a Motorola jab will get your meaning across? This year on Valentine’s Day, a regular time of postal mayhem, Australians sent some 20 million virtual cards via SMS, leaving the postie out of the loop.
Quoting Sam Brett, author of Luv ’N Txt, the rule-of- thumb guide to the SMS lifestyle: “In the time it takes to construct a [traditional] love letter, you can write 100 emails, watch 300 different channels on Foxtel and send 50 text messages.” Time is the essence in this era of gratification.
Closer to home, readers of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald dispatch some 6000 letters to respective editors every week, yet only a handful is hand-written. The rest is electronic. The inbox has usurped the postbox. Like a stamp, the age-old custom of correspondence is being placed in the corner by new technology.
At 54, Barbie is hip to the text boom, despite her inflexible fingers. Mattel released SMS Barbie in late 2004, with a pair of mini-phones geared for the modern pre-teen. And recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics support the figurine. Currently more than a third of our kids aged 11-12 own a mobile. (Come high school the bias of mobile owners is two students in every three.) Explaining that sea of vacant stares your lame riddle earned. Letters are, like, L8R.
Or possibly not. Let’s hold the phone. While composing this obituary to personal mail I discovered the medium to be still breathing, kicking, fighting back. Among all age groups, small cell groups are emerging, armed with stamps and paper, defying the popular flow. Yes, our children may belong to the Post-Post Generation, where broadband is oxygen, and 160 text characters can start or stop an affair, yet the personal letter persists. More, it could be finding new life.
One place to check the postal pulse is the southeastern edge of Melbourne. Larger than the MCG, the Dandenong Letters Centre is practically a postcode to itself, a vast clearing-house employing 1500 sorters and other staff. (Sydney has an equivalent fortress in Strathfield. Between the pair of them, these mini-Kremlins handle 15 million a letters a day.) Crunching the numbers, Aussie letterboxes are battered by almost 5 billion domestic letters a year. Snail mail, as e-types call it, seems to be racing along.
Enter the ambient hum, stroll among the sorting trays and feeding belts, the twinkle of control panels, the endless blur of envelopes, and you’ll see the true picture. Mail is a catch-all term. A shoe catalogue is mail. So too a circular from your local member, a plumbing bill, a speeding fine, tax reminders and bank statements. Cages arriving on the eastern dock, loaded with golf magazines, plastic-wrapped and pre-barcoded, equal mail as well.
“Addressed promotional mail is on the increase,” says Janice Mascini, state communications manager with Australia Post, and a site-guide for the day. “We’ve seen it grow to some 15 per cent of total mail volumes.” Examples spill into the hopper at our hips: direct marketing, real-estate spruiks, those fake postcards popular with Queensland resorts, charity plugs.
Mascini and I have reached a rubber tray packed by a queue of bills and cheques. “Transactional mail comprises some four-fifths of total letters volume,” adds Mascini. On a larger sorter – or FMOCR (Flats Mail Optical Character Reader) – a glut of annual reports is being spat skyward to a maze of conveyors. Eventually, area-coded, the mail will spiral down slippery-dips into index trays for finer division.
In the northwest wing the CFC (or Culler Facer Canceller) is digesting a hand-posted diet, the non-bulk mail from street boxes all round the country. Immediately the colours grab you – the variations of hand-script, the very presence of stamps. Most of these letters belong in the final category. “Social mail, such as private letters, postcards and greeting cards sent between individuals,” explains Mascini. “That accounts for around 5 per cent of total volume.” Under this roof, that translates as 350,000 personal letters a day.
Has the figure climbed or fallen lately? Michael Doyle, the centre’s production manager, picks up the challenge. “Parcels and packages have been our biggest growth category – mostly due to online sales. Whereas social mail is what we call flat growth. If it grows at all, it grows by 1 per cent a year.”
A decade ago, the social-mail slice was 8% of the pie, making email’s impact relatively negligible. Of anything, argues, Mascini, email has stolen ground from faxes and phone calls. “Many of the messages sent by email or SMS today are not ones which we would have sent through mail ten years ago.” Instead, we still rely on personal letters for the inherently personal.
Cyberspace and mobiles may offer new avenues to connect, yet one-to-one mail refuses to curl up and die. One reason may be the balm a card can offer, a tonic to erase day-to-day din of electronica.
“When email and texting appeared, we were worried,” admits Dan Maher, 44, co-owner of Affirmations, a boutique card firm based in Bellingen on the north coast OF NSW. Together with calligrapher wife Suzi, Dan began making elegant cards 17 years ago to counter the tourist kitsch they found while holidaying in Cairns. The business grew. And then the internet spectre arrived.
“I mean email is fantastic for overseas,” adds Maher, “staying in touch with the office, with friends. It’s instant communication. So it’s gratifying in that sense, but meaningless in another.” A letter or card, on the other hand, becomes a keepsake, proof of care between two people. It matters more. As a result, Affirmations has weathered the online and SMS storms. “We’re selling up to 400,000 more cards than we did five years back.”
Romina Francesca, 31 owns Il Papiro in Melbourne, a Florentine hideaway of handmade stationery and exquisite glass pens. Rather than agonise, she celebrates the mania that email embodies. “The shift to electronic works in our favour. Because it’s so widely used, people long for something more personal.” Around her, shelves groan with hand-made marbled paper, wax seals, ivied envelopes. “People actually want to use beautiful paper as a point of difference. They’re choosing pen and ink to make something special.”
Wayne Davis, 40, a self-confessed print addict, has seen a new postal trend surface in the last while. As owner of Artisan Press, a bohemian design shop in North Bondi, Davis has seen a shift in his work profile. “When I first started [in 2001], most of my work was wedding stuff and letterheads, but now it’s becoming more lettercards.”
Index-sized, or A6 in stationery-speak, the lettercard is huge in Asia and the States, and slowly taking hold here. ”People are using email for longer communications,” explains Davis, “whereas they’re sending cards or personalized lettercards for the other person to hold or keep.”
A typical example, says Davis, will display the sender’s name and address, maybe a little embellishment. “It usually never has an email address on it.” Above is a blank space for a concise or pithy expression. More a thought than thesis, this letter-lite evokes Blaire Pascal’s apology to a friend. In 1657 the French philosopher wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
Or you can take the bizarre option, down the road at Bondi Junction. Pepe Ianiello of Pepe’s Paperie has not just seen a fillip in fountain pens, but much of his more unusual stock. “Four years ago, I just fell in love with elephant dung paper. We carry some from every elephant-country in the world: Africa, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand. People are buying it for novelty value.” Or going the next level to get Tasmania’s own kangaroo-poo paper, denim paper, perfumed inks”¦.anything the electronic world can’t offer.
Rummaging in her Mum’s garage one day, Julie Delbridge, 45, found a bundle of letters in a shoebox. Intrigued, she sifted through the collection and found “these little masterpieces of passionate expression” from her Dad, wooing his future wife on paper. “Dad had decorated each sheet of writing paper with borders of hearts and flowers, drawn with a fountain pen. Each letter was so beautiful. And they made me think: people won’t find this sort of thing in 20 years’ time.”
More than most, Delbridge has a deep attachment to letters. As a ten-year-old girl, traveling America with those same love-struck parents, she stayed in San Luis Obispo above Los Angeles. “We met another family at a hotel and started talking to them. They had a girl my age and the mother suggested we become pen-pals.”
Thus Julie and Carrey swapped letters and secrets and presents for years. Hooked on the thrill of receiving mail, Delbridge joined a pen-friend collective while still at school. A quarter of a century later, three of those people (from Africa and Europe) she still counts as correspondents.
“I’m not against modern technology,” Delbridge is quick to add, “but there’s never any sense of where an email comes from. They all arrive on your desktop looking the same. Letters have a sense of adventure, a mystique. For me, email is fast food compared to a letter’s real nutrition.”
Now president of International Penfriends, Delbridge oversees some 300,000 members getting connected. Curiously, her largest influx of new members is school-aged, many classes joining en masse to sample the pleasures and implicit lessons of letter-writing. Delbridge confesses, “One teacher in America enrolled her student after receiving an entire essay in SMS language.” OMG – RU kidding?!
Australia Post, through its Postie Kate program in schools, is seeing a similar return to a former stamping ground. Freckled and flame-haired Katie is our down-under character in the vein of Postman Pat, the hero to revive the lost art of letters in Britain. Teachers can apply for fact files and resource kits to introduce the alien notion of writing and envelopes to the next generation. A postie for the Post-Posts to ensure the world’s first “on-line” conversation continues.
NOTABLE LINE DROPPING
“Adieu, my dear simple-minded, excitable, deep-voiced, sleepy, impatient Nora. A hundred thousand kisses. Jim” [James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 1904]
“Life – No, I’ve nothing to teach you about it at the moment. May be writing about it another week. EMF” [EM Forster to TE Lawrence, 1928]
“I am just as awkward without thee as one half of a pair of scissors without its fellow.” [Matthew Flinders to wife Ann, 1802?]
“Remember me to Baby when she is Born – if a boy don’t make him a tin soldier”¦” [Captain A McLeod at Anzac Cove, 1915]
“Until then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses; but give me none in return, for they set my blood on fire.” [Napoleon to Josephine, 1795]
“You are the mirror of the night. The violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter.” [Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, 1929?]
“In closing, I warn you, go easy with my money. I am in an extremely precarious profession whose livelihood depends on a fickle public.” [Groucho Marx in response to the Franklin Corporation annual report, 1961]
“The gable-topped fronts of the houses in a street stretching away under a blue sky spangled with stars are dark blue or violet and there is a green tree.” [Vincent van Gogh to brother Theo, 1888]
“Knowing literature as I do, and that it would be impossible in ten thousand years to equal what you have done, I send your writing back.” [Rejection letter from Chinese editor, date unknown]
[Sunday Life, June 2006]