On my father’s side of the family great-grandmother Kate could not abide being out of the limelight. At parties and reunions she would, as a matter of immutable routine when not getting enough attention, rush across the room, arms flung high, shrieking, ‘My God, my God, I’m dying!’ She knew that silent drooping in a corner would have no effect whatsoever on the noisy company, but her melodramatic proclamation had little effect, either, after the first few times. Nevertheless, it has gone down in family history, a fact which doubtless would have pleased her.

Childish memory selects according to its own mysterious criteria, transmits the voice, and uses it to construct a persona: eccentric Robert, excitable Kate. This would seem to be an unconscious process. In adulthood it is conscious, at least to a degree, and one’s own voice can be used to construct a persona for the moment, for the purpose. There is, for example, more than one kind of Australian diplomat: those who take care to preserve the careful accents of Melbourne Grammar and Trinity College, and the others, who know well that a broad Australian accent, lavishly peppered with rural phrases, will instantly wrap the solitary expatriate in well-remembered warmth. It matters little that such an expatriate may have been a city dweller all his life, for in his heart every Australian, be he bank clerk or barber, sees himself as a doughty contender against fire, flood, and drought, the strong, silent, bronzed type made famous by John Masefield and Anzac.

‘Gotta find a gum tree,’ muttered one servant of the government at a crowded dance in Kalamata, Greece. On his return raffle tickets were being sold in aid of a local charity. ‘Oh, the old chook raffle, eh?’ he asked, of no one in particular. No formal farewells for him. ‘Thank yer mother for the rabbit in the morning, luv,’ he called to me at departure time. Next morning I felt lonely.

I recorded the words of Robert and Kate and the diplomat lest they, and the distinctive voices which uttered them, be lost forever. I record my own in notebooks and diaries. I am not quite sure why, particularly as diarists have the reputation of being mediocre, complacent, pettifogging bores. Oh well. At least Virginia Woolf thought that psychoanalysts should investigate the business of diary-keeping, ‘for often it is the one mysterious fact in a life as clear as the sky and as candid as the dawn’.

People tell me life is the thing, but I prefer writing, and, I suppose, having lived in Greece for a very long time, I needed to talk to myself, to keep on talking when no one was listening. There was never an answering echo from Greek. Nor will there be, at this late stage. I needed to know, perhaps, that I still had an English-speaking voice, even if my children accuse me of not sounding Australian anymore. When you migrate in maturity you are on your own with your own language, which does not stay the same, and with the foreign voices around you calling, ‘Too late, too late.’ In maturity it is too late to learn the foreign language, to advance in the new culture, far too late to feel at home anywhere ever again.

A diary reassures the diarist through its clamour, but the reader may well be as impressed by the gaps and the silences. How much did Anaïs Nin actually say between the enormous gaps, like the absence of her husband, from all of the huge text which makes up her diaries? How genuine is her voice? Or voices? Surely her many voices are constructions rather than mere notations? But all writers can say, ‘This is the book I have written; you should read the one I could have written.’ Writing down the silence is just as important and can have very considerable effect. Gladstone, for example, complained about George Eliot’s Life. ‘It is not a life at all, but a reticence in three volumes.’

In the mighty Akathistos Hymn in the Greek Orthodox tradition, ‘wordy orators became as voiceless as fish’ in the presence of the Panagia, our All-Holy Lady. An eighteenth century folksong recounts the last mass in Santa Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. The splendour of sound was a vital part of the liturgy:

God, Earth and Sky and the great church rang the bells. There were 400 sounding boards and 62 bells, a priest for each bell and a deacon for each priest. Both Emperor and Patriarch were chanting and the pillars of the huge building were shaking. But as the worshippers were about to begin the hymn of the Cherubim, a voice came from the sky and the Archangel commanded, Stop the Cherubic hymn.

The silence of centuries began then, pierced only for a brief time by the weeping of the Panagia and the Archangel’s instructions.

Thus silence has enormous power and often a threatening value in Greek culture, and probably in other cultures as well. Whereas older generations of Anglo-Celt Australian females were encouraged to emulate Shakespeare’s Cordelia and cultivate a soft and low voice as being an excellent thing in woman, Greek women concentrate on the raised, noisy voice of self-sacrifice. Noise levels are the register of suffering in childbirth: the more noise you make, the more you are perceived to be suffering, and the better mother you are. In Greek conversation the more noise you make the more sincere you are perceived to be. Raised volume and glibness are associated with strength, with a kind of tuning in to the energies of the universe, and so, predictably enough, is a dramatic mode of expression. An elderly widow once grabbed me by the arm and exclaimed, ‘Ah, my golden one, how fortunate you are in your pethera. My mother-in-law now! Ach! If a knife had been plunged into her heart no blood would have spilled forth, not a drop!’ One of my children, while still quite young, began a school composition with a telling autobiographical line: ‘I well remember a New Year’s Day spent in bitter sorrow and inconsolable grief.’ No wonder the great Greek poet Seferis spoke of miserable homecomings to Greece, of the pain of ‘parallel monologues’. I know exactly how he felt.

Perhaps letters are parallel monologues as well. Letters provoke interesting reactions from great writers. Killjoy Kafka, that death’s head at the feast, maintained that the whole notion of communication by letter was utterly hopeless, being nothing but an intercourse between ghosts, one that was bound to lead to a complete disintegration of souls. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of ‘the veil of uncertainty and oblivion that falls on the posted letter’, and of ‘the indiscretions of letter-writing, the intimacies of speech.’ Letter-writing is both a safe and a dangerous activity: love at a distance. Letters are voices calling over that distance: ‘I’m here. Please listen to the story of my life. And please answer.’

Voices change within the space and time-lapse of a letter, and the writer hopes that the reader listens to each voice and in a particular way. A friend once told me the story of two of his ancestors. William Duncan of Aberdeen proposed to Alice Campbell of Argyle by letter. It was a particularly Scottish sort of letter, apparently: very precise, orderly, and methodical, and it pointed out all the advantages of the suggested union. But at the end the very canny William wrote, changing the tone of his voice quite radically, ‘But the sum and substance of this letter is your own dear self.’ Of course Alice said yes. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? Being female, she probably didn’t give a damn about the rest of the letter. I like to think that they lived happily ever after. My mother wrote letters to herself. I had had a vague idea that she was in the habit of doing this, but did not know for certain until after her death when, doing my filial duty and going through her things, I found a bundle of them in her bedside drawer. She had no secret or double life, but she did have a heavy burden which she bore alone with both dignity and grace. In her letters to herself she allowed her pain to speak aloud, almost as if hearing it and acknowledging it, setting it down and ordering it, eased it somewhat.

When using my grandfather’s letters the problem of writing down the voice emerged yet again. His type of voice, with its particular rhythms and careful placements, has gone forever, and I sometimes wonder whether he would recognise the newish Australian accent with its monotonous rising inflexion. He wrote to my grandmother from France during the years 1915–18, and his voice kept changing through all that long time. In intense explanatory mode he told his wife-to-be that he had enlisted because he could not bear her to consider him a shirker. Later came the voice of disillusionment: he declared that he would not advise anyone to enlist. Then there was the voice of worry: ‘I am so far behind.’ And a note of anger: ‘Who thinks the better of you? A satisfied conscience is the only reward.’ And then there was the everyday voice talking about what passed for routine and trivia, listing bombardment schedules and weather patterns. But lists themselves are the sound of voices and have been so forever; those of ancient routine call to us through the Linear B lists at Knossos, on Crete.

But now, as we seem to be moving into the post-literate age, with the telephone, the fax machine, and email replacing the gentle art of correspondence, there is a danger that voices are not being written down, or at least not in the same way; there is a danger that a great many voices may be lost, may never be able to speak across gulfs of time because they cannot speak quickly enough. Speed and convenience are the attractions of fax and email, whereas letter-writing, condescendingly termed snail mail, presupposes a certain amount of spare time and leisure, both of which appear to be at a premium and spent on other pursuits in today’s world. Faxes cannot be saved the way letters have been, in filing cabinets or in bundles tied with fraying ribbon. (For some obscure reason the ribbon seems nearly always to be blue.) Faxes fade much faster than letters. Letters can be filed on disc, of course, and I suppose that the untying of the ribbon and the careful handling of disintegrating, silverfish-ridden paper will be quite easily replaced by the slipping of discs into computers. But it will not be the same effort, and the particular act of touch, that necessarily gentle grasp of the paper, will disappear forever.

The viewing of the disc, the engaging of the computer memory, demand a specific effort, whereas pre-literate people simply sat down by their firesides and recalled lost voices through the medium of their own memories. Their firing-up was quite different; it, too, has been lost forever, or in the process of being lost. My mother-in-law’s very humble Peloponnesian kitchen was a salon or mini-theatre, in which she, Aphrodite, who could neither read nor write, was mistress of ceremonies, master mimic, and consummate actress: she presided over the company and trod the boards while never moving, reproducing as many as half a dozen voices in turn as she recalled stories and episodes from the past, as she went through her mentally stored lists of complicated genealogy. At funerals she and other old women sang the mirologoi, the songs of fate, elaborating a set formulae that can be traced back to the lament of Andromache over the body of Hector. And now Aphrodite, too, is dead.

My mother-in-law’s voice was always louder than mine, and she loved to talk, so that her silences were frightening evidence of great displeasure. But for two years before she died her mind began to replay the past and her voice came to resemble nothing so much as a broken record. I thought I had heard all she had to tell me, when, quite suddenly, she started to remember Katerini, her sister, one I never knew existed. Katerini died at the age of fifteen, when Aphrodite herself was probably about ten. When an unmarried girl of the Orthodox faith dies she is dressed as a bride. White candles burn at her head and feet during the vigil which precedes her funeral. Mourners are given the sugared almonds they would have been given at her wedding feast. Small wonder that Aphrodite had repressed all knowledge of this event. Now in her extreme old age and close to death she was speaking in the voice of private pain, using a voice long silenced.

The voices of my mother and my sister are silent, too, although sometimes I think I hear them. At other times I strive mightily to recall them and fail. Voices are, of course, as individual as fingerprints and probably cannot be satisfactorily recalled, for it would require a very long playing tape to capture every nuance, modulation, and variation in accent and tone. It is necessary to write down the voices of the dead as quickly as possible, before they become mere echoes in the mind, the sounds like far-off music in the night.

Writing, like Aphrodite’s carefully cultivated memory, freezes life, or sets moments and experiences in a kind of amber, so that not everything escapes us. Writing down the voice ensures us of at least some company, of some sort of a weapon against that inevitable consequence of the march of time, loss. I am glad now that I have also written down the voices of my sons, as the march of time seems somehow to be accelerating into a gallop. Their physical voices have broken, and their modes of expression and preoccupations are obviously maturing, but I still like to recall their childish voices and questions such as, ‘Were motorbikes invented when you were young, Mum?’