Dear Mum

I owe Mrs A $642.20 (Australian dollars). $574.00 was for the air fare to New Zealand and $68.20 was for the train trip from Melbourne to Sydney. Please pay this as soon as possible and I will pay you as soon as I get my refund from Malaysia Airlines.

I have no money at the moment so I was wondering if you could make a few phone calls on my behalf. Could you call the Emery freight office in Sydney (phone [02]3162111, speak to Tina) and arrange for my container to be returned to NZ (preferably to Wellington and preferably by surface mail). I already owe the company about $268 for transport from Auckland to Sydney and storage. The container weighs 150kg and the company charges around 80c/kg for transport by air freight.

Could you also call the cargo section of Sydney Airport or Air New Zealand and arrange for my other suitcase to be returned to NZ. I have already paid for this (it was about &86).

The rent at this hostel* is $140 per fortnight. If you have any old clothes you don't want could you send them to me since I don't have very many clothes with me and it is quite a bit colder here than in Australia.

Tessa

Emery office address in Sydney: Unit 17/1801, Botany Rd., Banksmeadow, Sydney. They also have an office in Auckland near Auckland Airport. Ninth letter...

* Wellington Women's Boarding House.



Tessa sent us the above letter on November 1, 1995, about two months before she was admitted to the psychiatric ward of a public hospital and diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. We didn't immediately do anything to retrieve her gear. We were far too busy making plans to have her hospitalized. And when we did get around to doing something — at the end of January 1996 — we found that the accrued storage fees had made abandonment of the luggage the best option. We explained the situation to Qantas, into whose possession the luggage had passed, and asked the airline to waive the storage fees. It refused to do so. Sadly, it was yet another organization (the Bank of New Zealand, Telecom and the Family Court in Wellington were the others) that proved totally unhelpful. We paid Mrs A and her husband as soon as they returned to New Zealand, but Tessa didn't reimburse us. She used the money from the refund from Malaysia Airlines to fly to Dunedin.