Don and I wrote letters to each other for over 30 years. This was an unusual experience in several ways.

            We wrote letters the old-fashioned way, sending them through the post. For most of those years, we composed our letters on a computer and printed them out.

            Why letters? That was the way Don communicated. He didn’t have a phone, and he didn’t have email until near the end.

            Don lived in Brisbane, a long way from Wollongong. We did meet a few times, but he wasn’t really a face-to-face sort of person, being awkward and ill at ease. On paper, though, he was articulate, opinionated, argumentative, informative and engaging.

            It started in 1992. I had arranged for the publication of a working paper by Louis Pascal about the origin of AIDS and polio vaccines. That was a story in itself. Anyway, remember that in 1992 very few people used email and it was before the World Wide Web.

            Pascal’s paper was long, 19,000 words, well written and startling. To publicise it, I sent copies to various people. One went to the magazine Nexus that publishes articles about global political machinations, fringe science and other unorthodox topics. Nexus published a short notice about Pascal’s paper, and before long I received numerous requests for copies from Nexus readers.

            Don was one of the Nexus readers who wrote asking for a copy of Pascal’s paper, and I posted him one. Soon after, Don wrote again, this time with extensive comments about the paper. His letter was four pages, single-spaced typing, all perfectly expressed without a single typo.

            Receiving such a detailed and well-thought-out comment was unusual — very unusual. I had sent Pascal’s paper to dozens, eventually hundreds, of people, and received quite a few comments, but no one else had written anything like Don.

            I wrote a fairly detailed reply to Don. Some of what he had written I disagreed with, so I explained my views. Don had requested copies of some other working papers, so I sent him those. Before long, he wrote again. This was the beginning of our long-running correspondence. And it was more than this. Don, as he learned about my interests, sent me copies of articles he thought would interest me. About once a month, a large envelope would arrive, perhaps a centimetre thick, along with a lengthy letter.

More about Don

Don was reared on a farm in Canada, attended Flinders University in Adelaide beginning in 1978, and moved to Brisbane in 1982. He worked as a printer.

            After he found out I was interested in whistleblowing, every envelope he sent me included articles about whistleblowing, many of them clipped from newspapers, others photocopied from magazines. He made sure to include publication details; on the newspaper clippings, he wrote the newspaper name, date and page number. I soon came to recognise his handwriting.

            Along with the clippings and articles, Don included a letter, usually several pages long, carefully typed, finishing at the bottom of the page. He was not one to waste paper.

            Don had been married but was no longer with his former wife. At some point he retired, thereafter living on the government pension in a small bedsitter. But he wanted to give back to the world. He spent much of his time at libraries in Brisbane, going through newspapers, magazines and books, making copies of articles he thought would be interesting to me.

State Library of Queensland

            I wasn’t his only correspondent. Don also looked for items that might be useful to others with whom he exchanged letters. Occasionally he told me about the others.

            Don sent me so many items that it took quite some time to go through all of them. As well, he sent me comments on drafts of things I had written, picking up mistakes and inconsistencies. He was acting as a sort of research assistant. I offered to pay him, but he always refused.

            I learned that he was incredibly thrifty. Back in the days when there were public phone boxes and people used phone cards, he would pick up discarded phone cards, some with credit on them, and send them to me, so I could give them to someone who needed them. He didn’t need them himself, not having a phone.

            He seemed to be a loner, keeping to himself, except for maintaining an active correspondence. Perhaps writing letters was his way of engaging with others.

Brisbane Square Library

Issues

Don was passionate about a range of issues. He had personal experience with what might be called psychic events, in which he seemed to enter a different realm. As well, he was attuned to people’s needs. On occasion, he told me about coming across an article that he didn’t understand but thought would be useful to one of his correspondents, and they found it was just what they needed. He told me about searching for some information and opening a book to the precise page where the answer was found. Some of these experiences might be called serendipity, others psychic.

            In 1996, he concluded a letter with the following story.

“My landlord died on 8 August and I anticipated being asked to move, so I started sorting things out. In the past I’ve donated things to a local charity called The Proper Goose. This time my intuition told me repeatedly (nag, nag) that when I went there, I was to ask about getting a removalist whom I could trust. When I did this, the woman gaped in amazement: ‘What an extraordinary coincidence,’ she said. ‘The man we recommend is standing beside you!’”

            One of his pet peeves was academia. As a mature-age student, he had gone to university, doing an undergraduate degree and a coursework masters. In his telling, he came across left-wing teachers who didn’t like his views. Unlike most students, he adhered to conservative positions, for example, thinking that poor people should take more initiative and that the government shouldn’t be propping them up. I can’t say what actually happened in classrooms, but his experience soured his view of academics and universities, and he would often write dismissively about academics, as if all of them were biased (to the left) and would take it out on any student who didn’t follow the party line. I remonstrated that academics are not all alike, that many do their best to encourage students to learn and to question orthodoxy, but nothing I wrote changed Don’s attitude.

A page from one of Don’s letters, showing his careful use of all available space

            Don was a climate sceptic. He didn’t think that the carbon dioxide emissions from human activity could make a difference to the global climate. He brought up stories about the Little Ice Age. He was sceptical of renewable energy options. He sent me piles of newspaper clippings questioning “climate orthodoxy.” For several years, the majority of these clippings were from The Australian, but after The Australian became less hostile to climate science, Don started sending me articles from an even more conservative newspaper, The Spectator Australia.

          

When I raised the point that most climate scientists said global warming was real and caused by humans, Don claimed they said this so they would receive more research money.

            Don insisted it was necessary to have large power plants that operate 24 hours per day, so-called baseload generators, because solar and wind power are intermittent. In his mind, intermittent power sources could never provide a reliable supply. This was a topic where I had some knowledge. Back in the early 1980s, I collaborated with my friend Mark Diesendorf on mathematical models of electricity grids with wind power. In building these models, we needed figures for the reliability of every type of power plant, so we obtained figures on outages — the times when plants are not available to produce power, including due to breakdowns and planned maintenance. Every type of plant, including baseload, has outages. To calculate the probability of loss of load, when not enough power is produced to meet demand, all the outages matter.

Mark Diesendorf, “The base-load fallacy“, 2007

            I tried to explain this to Don, but he would have none of it. He might acquiesce in a letter or two, and then revert to his beliefs about the necessity of having baseload plants because they would always be operating when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing. In vain did I ask what would happen when coal or nuclear baseload plants were offline, not able to produce power.

            When it came to health and medicine, he was a persistent critic of the medical establishment and occasionally wrote pieces that were published in magazines. He was an avid reader of alternative health articles and books. He sent me photocopies of articles and summaries of books, sometimes one or two pages of single-spaced text, filled with commentary and quoted passages. I couldn’t have asked more from a book review published in a journal. Several times, after I told Don about a friend with a health problem like osteoporosis, he sent a lengthy rundown on options, with many references.

            By now, you might think that Don was an extreme right-wing nutter, intransigent as well. But no.

On other topics, he took different lines. Don was a critic of military establishments, the arms trade and especially spy agencies like the CIA. For example, in February 1998, he wrote,

“It saddens me that Australia, Britain and Canada have agreed to become Clinton’s cowboys in a proposed attack on Iraq. … Naturally, TV ratings are a consideration. Watching malnourished Iraqi children slowly die is not riveting, while watching a cruise missile flying down a street, making a sharp left-hand turn then going through a window to blow the hell out of the place, is stirring stuff. Saddam Hussein is depicted as a bloodthirsty tyrant, yet not all that long ago he was a valued ally. We’re told Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction must be destroyed, while Israel’s larger arsenal of such weapons is ignored. We’re told Iraq cannot be allowed to thumb its nose at UN resolutions, it must be forced to ‘co-operate’ or else, while no attempt has ever been made to force Israel to comply with UN resolutions and stop occupying the territory of its neighbours.”

            Over the years, we addressed a wide range of topics, among them child-rearing, China, computers, cryptic crosswords, dissent, drugs, fluoridation, geography, media, memes, Olympics, protesters, sociobiology, voting systems and word processors. He often expressed annoyance when he noticed mistakes in geography and word use in newspapers. I carefully proofread everything I wrote to him, so it would pass muster. Don once mentioned having been labelled a scab in a community newsletter, indignantly informing me that he had never crossed a picket line in his life.

Thinking for yourself

Don’s most defining trait was his willingness to engage. He had strong views on some topics and could be resistant to changing them. That alone was not so different to many others I knew. What was different was that he thought for himself about diverse issues and was open to hearing contrary information and viewpoints.

            As time went on, Don lost many of his correspondents. Everyone was switching to email, and most wouldn’t take the time to print out letters and send them through the post. Don had a desktop computer and spent long hours dealing with software bugs. But he didn’t seek Internet access for many years. It was only in early 2023, after he had a serious accident and ended up in a hospital, that he started emailing me. I inferred that computer-club friends had helped set up his email access.

            It was the same old Don. He wrote long messages, including quotations from articles he found online. But it didn’t last. After May 2024, no more messages arrived. I could only guess that he had died. Alas, I didn’t know any of his friends in Brisbane who might know more.

            Why aren’t there more people like Don, who read widely, correspond with anyone sharing their interests, and think for themselves?

            During the years I corresponded with Don, I told some of my friends and colleagues about him, and suggested they might like to write to him, too, telling him about their interests. Almost certainly, I said, he would respond with a letter and copies of pertinent articles. Why not have an unpaid research assistant, scouring newspapers, magazines and journals for items on your favourite topics? It seemed an attractive proposition. But not a single person was interested, or had the nerve, to write to Don. Perhaps the very idea was so strange that it couldn’t be contemplated. Or perhaps they were put off by what I told them about Don’s views. Is it frightening to write to a prickly correspondent who might disagree? Alas, I doubt this sort of opportunity will come again. Don is gone, not to be replaced.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au 

Acknowledgements For helpful comments, I thank Paula Arvela, Kelly Gates, Marina Granato, Suzzanne Gray, Anita Johnson, Julia LeMonde and Linda Patel.

Appendix: an extract from Don’s letter of 3 February 2008

As for bad hyphenation, my word processor has an auto-hyphen function. I have never tried to use it, as I want to retain as much control as possible. You suggest people may be too lazy or busy to consult a dictionary. That’s probably so, as some word divisions are tricky, but it doesn’t account for how people can inappropriately hyphenate, for example, a compound word made up of two one-syllable words. A long, long time ago I saw ‘ben-chmark’, a sight forever seared into my head. I can only assume some younger people have no concept of syllables. Teaching English once was quite a simple matter; now it is complicated and with poorer outcomes. That’s progress for you.

            To something completely different, there is something missing from all analyses involving the Middle East. For the sake of an argument, let’s say there is a deity, which/whom I’ll give the title HeSheit. Since we were hunter-gatherers for almost all of our time as humans, HeShelt must have been deeply ‘embedded’ in the hunting-gathering means of existence, which did not revolve around land ownership. In that case, how come HeShelt dabbles in real estate in the Middle East?

            Speaking of that troubled region, a man was sent on a mission of peace. This man had for ten years rained bombs down on Muslims. He enthusiastically joined in the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq. He staunchly sided with Israel at every opportunity. I can only speculate this black comedy was devised to earn Blair a Nobel Peace Prize. The result has been to make President Putsch go on his own ‘peace-making’ pilgrimage to position himself for a Peace Prize.

George W Bush (President Putsch)

Then he’ll stop being jealous of All Gorge.

Al Gore (All Gorge)

To stay with politics, it looks like Obama bin Barrack may win the Democratic nomination. He will then approach Hilary bint Rodham and ask her to be his running partner, figuring this will get more Democrats on side. At the same time he’ll get advice from Bill Clinton, a particularly astute political thinker. Hilary will resist, saying “I’m tired of being number two!” Her consort then will say something like, “Honey, as soon as Obama wins, them good ol’ mountain boys will be oiling their squirrel guns and smooth-bores. A month after the inauguration, you’ll be POTUS.”