People of Letters
In August 2017, only a couple of weeks after accidentally tipping the first domino in Australia’s weirdest constitutional crisis, David Paris and I fronted up to ‘People of Letters’ in Melbourne. For those unfamiliar with it, People of Letters emerged from Women of Letters, an extraordinary ode to letter writing. Guests each read a letter penned to someone in their life, centered on a theme specific to each event.
Our People of Letters was about partnerships. There were couples, and colleagues, mentors and mentees, siblings and co-conspirators. Dave and I spoke about a decade of living and working together amid the madness that is Australian politics. My letter to Dave is below; you can read his here and obviously it’s bloody good.

Dear Paris,
What on earth were you thinking?
If you’d known where this road would go, back at no. 220 when we were putting this crazy unlikely thing together. I knew you a bit, back then, quiet guy with the carefully considered opinions who sometimes — increasingly frequently — walked with something no-one else could see.
Knew enough to not want to get on the back of that motorcycle ever again, and that if I’d be heading off into the unknown it would be a good idea to go with someone who somehow seemed to be good at everything I wasn’t. In other words… a lot.
If we could have looked forward a decade maybe we’d have predicted some things about right. The campaign wins and heartbreaks; we knew a little of what we were getting into. The politics, the late nights, and how hard this stuff can be on people.
But would we have guessed this? An exchange of letters one far-off winter in Melbourne, just you and me and 400 of our closest friends?
On a quiet afternoon in our Hyde Park backyard, after exactly the right amount of whisky in that affectionately run-down shithole, if we could take delivery of these letters back then… open them up, look across the bridge of an intervening decade, what on earth would we think?
How much more closely would we have held our Steph. That’s the first thing that hits. That some in whose company we started down this road would feel they had to step away sooner. Too soon.
You, Mr P, were the first one through the door in January 2007 and the last one left to turn out the lights that November after we did the thing. I’d want you to know how much I appreciated that, and I’d probably try to warn you to brace for it being harder on you than it should have been.
I’d want to let you know how much fun we’d have living with our mad Professor. That we’d meet cats. That we’d both have to step up in ways we couldn’t have predicted.
That we’d stand in a delirious, spontaneous New Years party at Shibuya Crossing that would hold its midnight celebrations in 40 second bursts when the crosswalk lights went green.
Or that 12 months later to the second we’d be on a rooftop in frozen Berlin that was just one amongst a thousand platforms for drunken fireworks, or that having people fire rockets at us out of apartment windows could be so much fun.
I’d want to advise you that the most intractable and wicked of the worlds problems can in fact be fixed through application of single malt whisky and sneaky cigarettes on a variety of balconies. Capitalism — fixed. Militarism — fixed. War on the internet — fixed.
I think I’d remind you that if you were serious about cultivating a reputation as a grumpy bastard that then not exchanging so much as a single cross word with me over the span of a decade would be bad for your brand, particularly given the number of times I must have tested your patience.
I’d want to put in writing how much I appreciated your help, and your mum’s help, with those early film screenings, and how much I’d come to rely as the years turned, on your forthright and unerringly consistent political judgement, like a compass needle that never once lost sight of magnetic north, no matter how strange some of the landscapes we’d find ourselves in.
I don’t know how I’d warn your 2007 self about 2016. I really don’t. How you’d be asked to turn all your talents at digital profile-raising and turn them to making someone disappear for a time.
How on earth four days of junk food, stray kangaroos and back-to-back episodes of ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’ could constitute therapy after everything that had happened.
And maybe more than anything else I’d make sure that you made your way to Margaret River with me, even just once, before June 2016. I wouldn’t have to explain why. In time, you’d know.
Someone once said — a friend is someone who knows all about you and loves you nonetheless. I can’t get this letter delivered to you in 2007 so I’ll say it now — thankyou Paris, for everything that’s gone, and everything that’s still to come.
If there’s one thing I’d write, maybe it would be to remind me to check my fucking citizenship?
And if I may, even though we’re 36 hours early, I wonder if I can invite some audience participation?
…happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday dear Paris,
happy birthday to you.
