As we near the fiftieth anniversary of the time when we left Daramalan, it’s wonderful to hear from former classmates who remember the time and the times of our youth. This morning I received a letter from Michael Backhouse who asked if I could help him locate a letter written by his father after the famous ‘gang of four’ item appeared in The Canberra Times. As an aside to the subject of original letter that caused a furore within the Canberra community, that raised important questions of discipline within the Catholic clergy in particular, all but one of the letter’s authors are now deceased.
Michael wrote to me:
I seem to remember that 5 or 6 years ago you sent me a copy of my father’s supportive letter to The Canberra Times not long after the 1968 letter by the ‘gang of four’ priests including Hingerty, Fallon, etc. You wrote an article on this letter and the matters surrounding it. I can't find my father’s letter (a few years ago I had a computer crash and lost two years worth of documents) and was wondering if you still have a copy that you could send me?
I hope Michael does not mind that I reprint his father’s letter here as it appeared in The Canberra Times of Tuesday, 6 August 1968.