Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies, 1949-1966 2022

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Robert Menzies received 22,000 letters during his record-breaking second term as PM - from war veterans, widows, and political leaders to school students and homespun philosophers. Ordinary citizens sent their congratulations and grievances and commented on speeches they had heard on the radio.

They lectured him, quoted Shakespeare and the Bible at him and sent advice on how to eliminate the rabbit problem. In Dear Prime Minister, Menzies' so-called 'Forgotten People' wrote back.

Martyn Lyons will discuss his new book which analyses the letters both as a source for 'history from below', and as a window on writing practices in the age of letter-writing. The Menzies letters belong to the genre of 'Writing Upwards', in which the weak wrote to the powerful to secure a favour or to make themselves heard.

About the speaker: Martyn Lyons was born in London, educated at Oxford, and since 1977 has been at the University of NSW, where he is now Emeritus Professor in History and European Studies. He has published several books on the history of reading and writing in Europe and Australia, including Australian Readers Remember: an oral history of reading 1890-1930 (1992), A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World (2010) and The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860-1920 (2013).