George Nikolic, Andrew Boxall, Paul Monk, Bruce Kirkpatrick, Frank Pulsford, Des Moore

Shameful Australians

SIR: Like Patrick McCauley (June 2010), I am proud to be—or, rather, to have become—Australian. To those proclaiming they are ashamed of being Australian I would like to say that I agree: I too am ashamed that they are Australian!

George Nikolić,

Hughes, ACT.

Turramurra Days

SIR: To a Turramurra boy, born and bred, Milton Osborne’s memoir “A Turramurra Childhood” (May 2010) was confirmation of a phenomenon which has long intrigued me, but which I suspected nobody else had noticed.

My father was the Turramurra greengrocer from 1930 until the 1970s. The Andersons, the Evatts and the Misses Smith were customers, and quite probably my father sold the fruit which decorated “Gwynneth’s grand ruin”. He knew the area and his customers well, and his stories of Turramurra in that period underline Mr Osborne’s theme, that leafy, discreet, prosperous and Presbyterian Turramurra was home to a quite disproportionate number of major figures in Australia’s cultural and…