Alan Fewster, ed. - Capital Correspondent: The Canberra Letters of Edwin Charles 1936-37

Alan Fewster, ed.,

Capital Correspondent: The Canberra Letters of Edwin Charles 1936-37

Charnwood ACT: Ginninderra Press, 2002

Pp. viii + 159.  Paperback.       ISBN 1-74027-133-5              $27.50

In May 1936, sixteen year-old Edwin Charles headed for Canberra to begin a career in the Commonwealth public service. A twenty-five hour train journey from his home at Murwillimbah, the nascent capital had a population of barely eight thousand and at first the lad was homesick in the hard-up world of hostels and snowy winters. ‘Canberra might be beautiful, but it’s ridiculous. … It gives me the creeps.’ But these eighteen months of letters home show that he soon threw himself into his new life. The fact that he was writing to his parents only partly explains the apparent asexuality of this independent teenage existence: it was an innocent world, in which chaste boys and girls played tennis, swam in the Molonglo, went to dances, church and the cinema. The sight of a plane in the sky was an event. When an MCC touring team called to play a Country XI, the Governor General invited the three amateurs to stay at Yarralumla while the pros bunked down at the Hotel Canberra. Hitler did not exist, the Abdication was a distant backdrop, the Coronation an excuse for a fireworks display. In Commonwealth politics, Menzies was the coming man, but already there were whispers that he had been too arrogant to risk his precious skin in the Great War. If one of the attractions of being a historian is that you get to read other people’s letters, then this collection is certainly attractive, with the additional merits of being skilfully edited and generously illustrated.