Claire Henson marvels that she has just flown to Canberra from Europe, taking just 27 hours, to present the National Library of Australia with a letter that took 201 days to dawdle across the seas from Van Diemen's Land to Scotland.
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The letter, handled gently on Tuesday in cotton-gloved hands, was written on 25 March, 1824 by William Charleson of Hobart Town and sent to his mother in Caithness, Scotland. One of Charleson's descendants, Claire Henson, came especially from France to donate the letter to the NLA.
Canberra researcher Keith Blackburn has been painstakingly researching, since 1999, his great grandfather William Charleson's life in Australia. Charleson left Scotland for the Antipodes in 1823 and spent the rest of his life in Tasmania. Earlier this year, Blackburn, after endlessly searching for the original of the 1824 letter and finding a copy of it in Tasmanian archives, used the miracle of the internet to write to Claire Henson in Normandy.
"I wrote to Claire," he explained on Tuesday, "saying 'I know this letter exists or once existed. Do you know if it still exists and if so do you know who has it?' Well, about half an hour later an email arrives from Claire saying 'O boy! This is your lucky day. Not only do I know where it is, I have it!' "
On Tuesday, gingerly taking it out of its original envelope and then unfolding the old letter (although it is wonderfully robust for a paper object almost 200 years old) curator of manuscripts Kylie Scroope explained why it is such a treasure.
"It's a small thing in some ways but provides a great snapshot of what life was like for a new arrival in Van Diemen's Land as it was then ... the issues that were on his mind and probably on the minds of lots of those in the colony. It enriches the story of what was happening in Van Diemen's land at the time. He was an ordinary man [writing from the point of view of the man in the street] whereas a lot of the records we have relating to that time are [by officials] much more about administrative issues and government arrangements."
Charleson's letter, immaculately and stylishly written (with metal-nibbed pen and ink), and flawlessly spelled even though he was a working man, a house carpenter, ranges across matters of Hobart Town society. He reports to his mother the amazing social and economic mobility of former convicts who are doing well since "soberly and industriously" staying on the straight and narrow.
It emerged on Tuesday that the much-travelled letter having arrived in Thurso, Caithness on 11 October 1824, was so treasured that it was kept in the careful possession of family members first for 30 or 40 years in Orkney, then in Liverpool and then in Kent. More recently it has been with Claire Henson in Normandy but from Tuesday, at last, the wandering letter has in a sense come home.
"This is where it belongs," Claire Henson insisted on Tuesday, happy to donate it to an institution that will so treasure it that it seems destined (Tuesday discussions seemed to hint) to grace the Library's vaunted Treasures Gallery.
