Letters to the Editor

Print the Legend Dear Editor, In his review of Roger McDonald’s novel The Following, Don Anderson alludes to John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) in criticising McDonald for getting the facts wrong (St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney is run by the Sisters of Charity, not the Sisters of Mercy). But Anderson gets two facts wrong himself when he cites the movie. The small town’s editor of the Shinbone Star, Dutton Peabody, a scholarly drunk played by Edmond O’Brien, does not say: ‘When history conflicts with the legend, print the legend.’ When something like this is said, Peabody is long dead after suffering a brutal beating from the violent Liberty Valance. The beating triggers the climactic gunfight in the dark main street between Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin) and the tenderfoot Ransom (‘Ranse’) Stoddard, the penniless brave young lawyer as played by James Stewart. Later, the rugged small-time rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) tells Stoddard that, when the gun duel took place, he actually shot Valance unnoticed from a darkened adjacent laneway, thus making Stoddard into a legendary Western hero who later becomes a famed US senator on the initial strength of killing the evil desperado. Much later, the now elderly Stoddard returns by train to Shinbone to attend Tom’s funeral. Cornered by the pushy local newspaper man Mr Scott, he decides to tell the real story of the gunfight. When Stoddard asks Scott if he will print the sensational scoop in his modern state-wide newspaper, Scott refuses and replies: ‘This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’ – not exactly what Anderson quoted. – John Ramsland, Newcastle, NSW

Print the Legend

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Climate Change and International History: Negotiating science, global change, and environmental justice by Ruth A. Morgan

Selected Stories by Franz Kafka, translated and edited by Mark Harman