Object Lessons.

If you are skull-dragging and out of inspiration this week, mosey over to :: Object Not Found :: and check out the museum of found letters, postcards, photos and wall-writing kept there. The glass-cases are dusted down by curator Damien Frost of Sticky Gum, who might even let you upload your own objects if you’re nice to him. My personal favourites are the notes to future readers scribbled down on the inside covers of second-hand or library books. “Yo Dunc. A perfect book for the blind. Be informed that I am a ghost from a well-known cemetery. And is that a whole goanna pressed between the pages?

Looking at the site I suddenly remembered that under the floorboards of an old house in Wembley Lucy and I had stowed a time-capsule with imagined letters written by the ghosts of the dead children of the future (it was probably found on the first termite inspection - our open alphabet, the childish A’s and E’s, giving us away). “To whoever finds this. You have uncorked a ghost" I think it said. Mind you, ghosts in a bottle are a dime a dozen on ebay these days. We liked to leave our traces as children, to bury trinkets in the alley or hide our objet d'arts (invariably made from toothpicks, grass knots and old toast) in the crooks of fig trees.

The love notes on the Object Not Found site still hold their voltage, evidence of abandoned intimacies and broken trysts. Next time I write a love letter I don’t mean to send I’m not going to hit delete or screw it into a fist and put it in the household bin. I’m going to leave it, folded neatly in some inconspicuous public space. Maybe between the slats of a bus stop bench, or buried in a coffee sack at Kakulas. Imagine all those words that we have in our repositories – too charged for us to keep, too confidential to let go. Rip off the by-line I say! Free-range objects set to inspire their finders.