Writing Upwards: Letters to Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister, 1949–1966

Authors

  • Martyn Lyons

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51734/jes.v2i1.27

Abstract

Robert Gordon Menzies received approximately 22,000 letters during his record-breaking second term of office as Australia’s Prime Minister (1949–66). This article examines the corpus as an example of “writing upwards,” a distinctive epistolary genre in which the weak wrote to the powerful, to praise them, berate them, abuse them, or perhaps wish them a happy birthday. From this perspective, the Menzies correspondence takes its place alongside the correspondence of other twentieth-century leaders that has already attracted scholarly and popular interest (the Belgian monarchy, Hitler, Mussolini, Mitterrand, Obama). After surveying this literature and establishing the Australian context, I give a brief presentation of the corpus as a whole. I then focus on one fundamental assumption of letter writers engaged in “writing upwards”: they believed their leader or superior was directly accessible and that they could establish a personal connection with him. By cutting through bureaucratic red tape and by using the epistolary hotline to the top, they could solve a problem or at least make their grievance heard. I indicate the difficulties and illusions they experienced, and outline the tactics deployed by Menzies’s secretariat in responding to their letters.

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Published

2020-11-24