Once it was quite an ordinary thing for human beings to see and hear the spirits of the place where they lived and to look to such spirits to provide food and shelter and all the materials for life as well as advice about how to live it. The world would have seemed unimaginably sterile and meaningless without them. Since then as the world has become noisier the earth has fallen mute, but in Melbourne in 2007 one junk mail deliverer can not only hear the voices in the street, he can talk back to them too.