Driving through Tamworth over Easter I picked up a copy of their free local paper “Tamworth City News’ produced by the same publisher as our very own “Armidale Independent’, Evans Publishing. All was going well until I got to the Letters to the Editor section and was struck by a mild bout of déjàvu because two of the letters were repeated, I’d read them both a day earlier in Armidale. And they weren’t just any type of letter as I suspect they were written by people with a heavy right hand.
Firstly, “Coal not candles’ by Viv Forbes states that she thinks that Earth Hour should “celebrate coal, not candles” and salute “the real people who produce the coal on which most people on earth depend”. The second letter “Down the path to destruction” by Jay Nauss thinks that “We need more Clive Palmers”. Okay, fair enough, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and what better place to air them then in YOUR local paper with a distribution of 16,000 (Armidale Independent) and 18,000 (Tamworth City News) to local homes and businesses. But is someone having us on? I mean, why were these two particular letters repeated? I didn’t see any other letters repeated in that edition so why those two?
Maybe I’m wrong and these two are serial “Letter to the Editor’ submitters. But it all just seems a little strange and it gets even better… With the aid of google, I found out that neither Viv Forbes nor Jay Nauss even live in the New England region. In fact, they both hail from “The Smart State’, Queensland. Surely we deserve to know where the writers of these letters live at the very least! I mean here I was, thinking Viv and Jay were that craggy old couple I see walking up Jessie Street everyday, my apologises to whoever this couple may actually be, next time if you’re lucky, I might even say hello.
Zena Kells,
Armidale
