Research on Robert Menzies’ post-war prime ministership (1949-1966) has for the most part been ‘history from above’. With the occasional notable exception from social history such as Janet McCalman’s Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle-class Generation 1920-1990 (1993), his ‘Forgotten People’ have usually been evoked through their identities as voters and consumers, or through their symbolic role in public language, such as in a celebrated study by Judith Brett. This paper uses an alternative method, attempting to recover their voices and agency by drawing on correspondence with Menzies from ‘ordinary people’. These letters provide a powerful insight into major themes from the era, including the nature of anti-communism, popular religiosity, attitudes to government, understandings of political leadership and communication, the impact of the long boom, the decline of the British Empire and the relationship of gender, class and national identities to politics. Consideration of these sources can illuminate issues that have been neglected in political research focussed on elite behaviour, and shed new light on the forces that helped produce and then sustain the longest prime ministership in Australian history.