Peter Conrad’s piece on Hugh Lunn (‘Lest We Forget’, November 2010) raises the important matter of history versus nostalgia. Having a strong following, Lunn is a prolific author, including of a hagiography of Jo Bjelke-Petersen, but much better known to the public for his childhood reminiscences about growing up in the Brisbane suburbs of the 1950s.

Lunn’s Words Fail Me is also about the 1950s and the language and habits of that time relative to the more Americanised variants often prevailing today. Lunn makes no secret of his attraction to 1950’s Australia. Conrad, by contrast, concludes: “The past is not our lost homeland but a foreign country, pale-faced and uniformly blank-minded, and I don’t want to go back and live there.”

There is more at stake here than clashing subjectivities about the much maligned 1950s. Based on his extensive historical writings, it seems clear that Conrad would not deny that thoughtful travel (with or without a return ticket) can broaden the mind, and that includes travel into the past.

But too nostalgic a cast of mind, however motivated and with whatever conscious or subconscious political purpose, can get in the way of any such ‘broadening’ process.

The past may indeed be a ‘foreign country’ but often worth exploring for understanding and enlightenment, and not merely nostalgia – tendentious or otherwise.

Barry Naughten

Farrer, ACT