But for me the particular shock, the emotional jolt and the delight was in Rosaleen Love’s rumination, ‘Treasure Hunt’. First was the discovery, from her very first paragraph, that Harold had died. Harold (at the time the undergraduate embodiment of an Oxbridge don) was editor of Semper Floreat, the student newspaper at the University of Queensland, when I was a first-year medical student, and he published my first journalism (so there was a compensating delight with the May ABR because I think that when I was the editor in 1962 I published Humphrey McQueen’s earliest journalism). It also made me remember 2002 and the launch of Rob Jordan’s splendid, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia, 1788–1840, at the Mitchell Library. A photograph was taken of him, Harold, Joan Kerr and myself. Two of them are now dead. Life is indeed short, but the literary life can be long and, as Rosaleen so poignantly reminded us, books can, themselves, be biography.

The editor of ABR has set himself a dauntingly high standard with that issue of the magazine. Congratulations and thanks.

John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

Dr Carmody, in his generous letter, modestly omitted to note that he reviewed Harold Love’s James Edwards Neild in the September 1989 issue of ABR. There is a further connection with Semper Floreat. Mark Gomes, our new Editorial Intern, edited the newspaper in 2001. Ed.

The longest thirty-five miles

Dear Editor,

Thanks to Jane Goodall for her brilliant essay ‘Footprints’ (April 2009), words and ideas that will reverberate for a long time to come. The essay contained one anomaly which is presumably inadvertent: Pahom’s calculation that if he walks thirty-five miles he will encompass an area of 150 acres. My first reaction is that this must be a mistake. Surely the area would be ten times that? But is it so simple? I am beguiled by what Goodall refers to as a confusion of ‘the primary principles of time and space’.

I am staying on a farm of about 150 acres. Working out the length of a boundary is not straightforward, even if the boundary is regular, which this one isn’t. My father has an idea about it, because he once made a relief model of the farm. The hills are steep, and the ups and downs belie the flat two-dimensional measurements of a map.

I have an idea about it, too, because later I will cross the farm to the gate, walk along a side boundary and then at least twice that distance again to the highway. So my walk will be more than equivalent to circumnavigating the farm. It will take less than an hour, I hope; otherwise I will miss the bus. An hour, not a day, and not even a quarter of thirty-five miles. But I will be walking on made tracks and roads, quick and short. What if the single log of the farm bridge has finally rotted away and I have to double back to ford the creek? That will add to both the distance and the time. The Bashkir country, according to the atlas, is on the slopes of the Urals. Perhaps Pahom spent half his day and his thirty-five miles finding places to cross racing streams? The time of year becomes a factor. Distances might be longer in spring.

The issue of wet shoes reminds me that the original inhabitants of my country walked barefoot, not something I could manage, or not since childhood. But would they have walked thirty-five miles in a day? Did they ever need to travel so far so fast? Did the Bashkirs?

My carbon footprint is erratic. Fifty minutes (the day is cool) to walk five kilometres, then four hours in the bus to travel 300 kms, then three hours in a plane to travel 3000 kilometres. Then I will check the Internet, which offers me the illusion of owning the whole world without walking one step. It will tell me whether this confusion about miles and acres is Tolstoy’s, or the translator’s, or Jane Goodall’s, or ABR’s. Behind an endless regurgitation of information (17.6 million entries for ‘Tolstoy how much land does a man need’) I will shelter from the uncomfortable idea that concepts of time, space and land ownership are not precise, not unchanging and not impartial.

Margaret Merrilees, Forestville, SA

Jane Goodall replies:

Margaret Merrilees is right about the area being in excess of 150 acres: in the story, Tolstoy says Pahom will ‘cultivate about 150 acres’ and ‘sell the poorer bits’, or use them for grazing land. I should have been more particular. She is also right to draw attention to this, as Tolstoy was a man of the land and would have been accurate about such measurements, though there is also some complexity around the translation of Russian measures, which would have been in versts. With regard to the thirty-five miles, we can be more confident of the numbers. It is summer, so the day is long, and other nineteenth-century walkers record striding out to such extents. Thomas De Quincey makes reference to covering thirty-five miles on foot in a day, following his escape from boarding school.