Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

by Geraldine Brooks

  I turned fifteen as the sixties came to a close. The country was at war and thousands of young people were routinely getting their heads busted in the streets of the cities for protesting Australia’s involvement. I spent my days at school on Bland Street, convinced that history was happening without me.

  In fact, little pieces of history were moving in all around me. The Serbs next door were survivors of the fascist Ustasha. The elderly White Russian spinster at the top of our street had fled the revolution with her family and spent her girlhood in Manchuria. The Turk over the back fence had lived through two coups. Mrs. Papas’s Greek family had felt the heavy hand of the military junta.

  At the end of the sixties, it remained more fashionable to laugh at immigrants than to listen to them. When the Papas family moved into a tiny liver-brick cottage across the road, they covered it with white stucco and replaced its veranda with a columned portico—turning it into a sad little parody of the ancient island homes they’d left behind.

  It was intellectually chic, in the 1960s, to make fun of the Greeks’ penchant for stucco and the Italians’ propensity for covering every surface in aquamarine or flamingo pink. It was part of a mocking riff against Australian lower-middle-class suburban life, which was invariably portrayed as empty, vapid, philistine.

  The few publications that addressed Australian reality were utterly contemptuous of the section of it that I inhabited. “Behold the man—the Australian man of today—on Sunday mornings in the suburbs.… A block of land, a brick veneer, and the motor-mower beside him in the wilderness—what more does he want to sustain him … ?” wrote Allan Ashbolt in the mainstream intellectual journal Meanjin. The flagship of the alternative press, Oz magazine, was even more cutting—dismissing all inhabitants of the sprawl as undifferentiated idiots named Alf whose lives passed without drama or passion or deep emotion of any kind. Towering literary figures such as Patrick White joined in the chorus of disdain. In The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway writes in loving detail of the places she lived. But when her family is forced by strapped finances to move for a time to my slice of Sydney—an “unfashionable, lower-middle-class suburb to the west of the city”—she dispatches the experience within a page and a half and does not even give the suburb’s name.

  Barry Humphries, a cruel and brilliant satirist, appeared on stage as “Edna Everage,” a suburban housewife who loves gladiolus, decorates her walls with plaster flying ducks and aspires to cruise-ship vacations. After attending one of his revues, I was mortified that we too had plaster ducks formation-flying across our sitting-room wall. The next time my mother asked me to dust, I “accidentally” dropped one, wrecking the set and causing my mother to take them down.

  A few minutes’ independent reflection on what I knew about where I lived would have exposed the superficiality of these caricatures. Even our humble neighbor Edna, whose very name was a joke to Humphries, was a survivor of betrayal whose day-to-day good humor was evidence of the existence of grace. When her husband walked out on her, leaving her penniless with two sons to raise, the Catholic Church asked her to make a choice. If she ever remarried, the priest told her, she would never be able to take Communion. By choosing the Church, she condemned herself to a lonely, frugal life, taking in spinster borders to make ends meet. But over all the “cuppas” she shared with my mother, I never once heard her complain.

  As for Mrs. Papas, the seamstress, her life was a modern Greek tragedy. Exiled in her girlhood to a land at the end of the earth so her wages could send a brother to school; married without her consent to a man her intellectual inferior; terrified of the blood on her wedding night, with no one who spoke her language there to reassure her; waking one morning to realize her husband hadn’t come home and finding herself unable to persuade cynical policemen that he was really missing, not adulterously AWOL; finally hearing, months later, that his body had been found in an abandoned railyard.

  The intellectuals of Oz and Meanjin could be forgiven for poking fun at such people for seeming to settle for the small life of the suburbs. They didn’t know my neighbors’ stories.

  It is less easy to forgive myself.

  “I’ve been passing around petitions against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia,” Joannie wrote in May 1970. “I was sent to the office for passing one around in school (would you believe you need permission … ?)”

  Yes, I believed it. At my school it suddenly seemed as though you needed permission to sneeze. Not long after the assembly at which she’d told us about her work in the New York ghettos, Sister Ruth disappeared. No announcement was made, but whispers soon passed word that she had left the convent. It made sense to me: how could Bland Street hold on to someone who had walked the mean streets of Harlem? My feverish imagination conjured a romance with a handsome Black Panther, and I visualized Ruth, nun’s habit banished, wafting through the ghetto in flowing Indian prints.

  Other favorite nuns also disappeared. Sister Gabriella, who had used religion classes to open our eyes to apartheid and to our own disgraceful history with Australian Aborigines, went to work in a pub and was married in no time.

  The nuns who remained hunkered down in defensive reaction. The new principal was no firebrand feminist. Before you could say “Bless me, Father” we were back in the Dark Ages. Assemblies designed to open our minds to human rights and social activism were swiftly replaced with harangues on the proper way to wear our uniforms so as not to call attention to our bustlines.

  But our minds had been touched beyond the reach of this attempted counterrevolution. The lay staff from Sister Ruth’s era remained, teaching us to ask the very questions that the new regime wished to avoid. An exchange teacher arrived from the United States and seemed stunned by how reserved and inarticulate we all were. She urged us to discuss things, to jump in with comments without raising our hands. She had grown up on a farm in Ohio, and she described her life there in fascinating detail.

  At fifteen, I had never seen a farm. For all the mystique of the Outback, Australians are among the most urbanized people in the world, with more than ninety percent of the population crowded into the six large coastal cities. Never having been west of the Blue Mountains, the Outback was a rumor to me. My images were gleaned from my mother’s descriptions of Boorowa, embellished with vague clichés about remote sheep stations the size of Belgium where children got their schooling by shortwave radio and doctors arrived by plane.

  Ohio’s patchwork of small family holdings sounded cozy—like something in a storybook. But the teacher talked also of the stifling conservatism of Midwestern rural life and how difficult it was to be a nonconformist in a community where the local church was the center of your social world. Once again, I came face to face with the fact that Sydney, for all its distance, was more culturally diverse than many other places in which I might have been set down.

  Not long before she vanished, Sister Ruth hired the school’s first male teacher. Anybody else might have introduced men to our cloistered world gently, with a tweedy geriatric or two. But Sister Ruth chose Mr. Bishop, a twenty-something drop-dead-gorgeous blond with long hair and a Zapata mustache. Of course I fell in love with him. We all did. Somehow, he managed to keep an unswelled head and a straight face, as adolescents hitched up their mauve uniforms and swooned in his path.

  Sister Ruth had chosen him because he happened to be an inspired teacher. Until his arrival, the geography syllabus’s dull fixation on population statistics and lists of principal crops had bored me stiff. But Mr. Bishop had been to the places he talked about. When he taught us about New Guinea, it wasn’t in National Geographic images of men in bird-of-paradise headdresses. He told of slogging through viscous mud to meet tribes whose hunting grounds had been laid waste by international mining companies. He described the status of women in many highland villages—somewhere below the status of pigs. Mr. Bishop connected the wiring between my fascination with Elsewhere and the facts to be had in the geography textbooks.

  He also taught English, i
ntroducing us to off-the-syllabus poets such as Wilfred Owen, whose antiwar poems opened my eyes to the fact that our generation hadn’t invented pacifism.

  I wrote to Joannie about Mr. Bishop, and she was gratifyingly impressed. “My English teacher this year is bowlegged, funnyfaced, and a staunch conservative anti-communist. He tries to indoctrinate us in class—‘You just can’t let Communists stay around—if you let one germ live it’ll multiply and soon the whole world will be taken over.’ Etcetera. I have had a strong temptation to say ‘Bullshit’ to his face several times, but I generally don’t curse and besides if I told him that, I can imagine what grade I would receive.”

  I understood her predicament. Despite my radical pretensions, I was doing quite well at the hands of the evil Establishment. I’d won a government scholarship that was paying all my school expenses. My painting of a melting face, heavily influenced by the psychedelic poster art of San Francisco, had taken first prize at the Ashfield art exhibition. That winter my mother and father and I vacationed in Tasmania—the first time any of us had been on a plane. It was a trip I’d won in a Young Reporters’ Contest run by the national newspaper, the Australian.

  That year, also, our debating team won the final of the citywide tournament by arguing for the proposition “That Science Is a Menace.” I could argue with some feeling, because another prize I’d hoped to win, in the statewide science fair, had certainly created a menace to my mother’s mental health. My project, to prove the food value of certain common garden weeds, had required keeping mice. My mother’s lifelong fear of the rodents lost the war with her desire to encourage all my academic endeavors. Even though the project only required adding small amounts of nontoxic weed to the mice’s diet each week and weighing them to see if they continued to thrive, I couldn’t face actually experimenting on an animal. So I volunteered to care for the control group.

  Joannie, who had been keeping mice for four years, sent me reams of advice: “I feed my mice a mixture of birdseed, oatmeal, and cornmeal all swished together, plus a little lettuce for each mouse, and a dog biscuit once a week.… They like shredded paper towel to make a nest in, or a small cardboard box. Don’t give them newspaper because the ink will rub off on their fur and they’ll eat it while attempting to clean themselves.”

  In thanks, I named one of the control mice Joannie, although since all were albinos I had difficulty telling her apart from the others: Spock, Rudolph and Margot (the latter two named for a balletomane phase I was passing through).

  “Do you know that I never had a mouse named for me before? I was very flattered—and to have my name in such a company of distinguished persons!” Joannie, of course, had already had several Spocks in her mice cages: “Mr. Spock the first (black and white) who lived to be almost two years old and died last 8 August 1969, when we were in Europe. Mr. Spock the second was eaten by his mother before his eyes even opened. Now I have Mr. Spock the third (black) who’ll be a year old on October 12. Long live the Spocks!”

  Unfortunately, my Mr. Spock met a grisly end, along with the noble attempt to alleviate world hunger and the run at the science prize. The project fell apart when my mice—the control group, fed on the gourmet mouse mix—began eating each other. The day we gave away the sole—and very fat—survivor of my doomed experiment was a happy one for my mother. Joannie was consoling: “Perhaps you just had paranoid mice.”

  Joannie probably could have gotten away with saying “Bullshit” to her English teacher. Her high school seemed to be in the kind of tumult where a few “bullshits” here or there wouldn’t have been noticed. Her first letter of 1971 contained an account of a performance in the school assembly hall of a band called Voice of America—“They used amplifiers and light boxes and electric guitars.… I had to get up and leave because the sound was really murdering my ears.… Just before I left, there was a disturbance on stage; a couple of students wanted to make an announcement about how they had been unjustly treated. A couple of teachers dragged them off. Now the whole school is in uproar about it.”

  She sent me copies of the student samizdat being passed around. One poorly typed handout was addressed:

  TO ALL THOSE SMOKING IN THE BATHROOMS (and we ain’t just talking about cigarettes either).

  … has it ever occured to you why the school talks about getting draft counseling but never does get it? they know that if enough people took a look at the draft, they would find it immoralx if you are 18 youx z can vote for the president of the u.s., and fight in a war and kill or be killed, yet you cant walk the halls or go to the bathroom with out a pass.… what it xallx comes down to is you are either part of the problem or part of the solution, which side are you on? do you want to lead the zombie life: black suit and tie, nine to five, five days a week, sipping martinis on the 8o”clock train to the big city …

  Those who wished to be part of the solution were urged to attend a meeting about it. “Only 35 people showed up,” wrote Joannie in disgust. It seemed that most of the Maplewood students didn’t mind the idea of sipping martinis after all.

  But Joannie was despairing about the state of her country. “When I grow up, if I ever get a chance to, I’m getting out of America as fast as I possibly can and moving to Austria or England or somesuch.” She began adding little editorial comments to the return address in the top left-hand corner of her envelopes: “United States of Amerika,” or “U.S.A. (unfortunately).”

  Every summer, when school let out, the postmark on her letters signaled her presence in yet another exotic location. “The clouds are just lifting from the mountain tops” she wrote in the summer of 1971, from a town named Visp in Switzerland where she was summering with a family as part of a student exchange program. In July 1972 her address was Salzburg, where she was taking intensive German classes at the American Institute for Foreign Study. Then she was on a train back to Switzerland with Dolfi, the boy from the family she’d stayed with the previous year: “He’s what I guess would be called my summer boyfriend, and would be my winter boyfriend too, if only possible!”

  Again, I was desperately envious. At sixteen, I was just beginning to be allowed to see boys, but only at home or on group outings to carefully screened activities. Chaperones and curfews hedged every move. The idea of being free to travel across Europe with a boyfriend seemed wildly, impossibly romantic.

  By August, Joannie was back in the States, writing from a town named Menemsha. Her postcards showed dazzling sunsets on a reach of tranquil water. It looked like a scenic spot, but the rest of the address—“Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.”—meant nothing to me. “We have a house and a cabin here, right next to each other … the cabin is just a cabin, one room, with two beds in it, which I took over two years ago and have since redecorated.… I’m working on some new curtains for it now.… Then it’s back to school on September 6 … the fact that it’s an election year should lend some interest. I’m still for McGovern even though he did make a mess of the Eagleton affair, but I don’t think he’ll win.…”

  Nineteen seventy-two was also an election year in Australia. For once the result was in doubt, largely because of Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. A bureaucrat’s careless prediction that the venture would buy U.S. goodwill without “disproportionate expenditure” now had its exact price: four hundred and ninety-four Australians had died, many of them conscripts too young to vote against the government sending them to war.

  For the first time in decades, the Labor Party had a charismatic leader, Gough Whitlam, to articulate popular rage and frustration. Whitlam was a witty barrister with a classicist’s breadth of knowledge. Almost six and a half feet tall, he towered both literally and figuratively over the Liberal pygmies who had succeeded Menzies (who had finally retired at the age of seventy-one).

  On election night, December 2, we sat glued to the TV as the ballot-count came in. For once, my father had backed a winner. Like millions of Australians, we celebrated.

  It is no exaggeration to say Australia changed overn
ight. Whitlam immediately ended conscription, freed jailed draft dodgers and ordered the troops home from Vietnam. Wages and welfare payments rose. Aborigines got real say in their own affairs. Women got equal pay. The voting age was lowered to eighteen from twenty-one. The arts began to receive an unprecedented infusion of government funding. Whitlam introduced universal health insurance, doubled education spending, abolished university fees and established generous allowances for students who needed them. “God Save the Queen” ceased to be our national anthem, and we stopped shunning countries like Cuba and China just because the Americans told us to.

  Every day, under Whitlam, Australia seemed to become more itself and less a pale imitation of elsewhere. Gardening shows began to address how to plant banksias rather than boxwoods. Art exhibitions featured Australian painters rather than imports. Australian movies started to reflect our own reality and our own sense of fantasy. Genuine Australian accents replaced elocution-lesson English on the radio and television.

  It is a great thing, at seventeen, to learn that it’s possible to change the world. I started my last year of high school knowing that if I did well I would go to university without financial hardship. When I wrote my return address on letters to my pen pals, I was proud that I lived in such a progressive place. For the first time in my life, there was nowhere else I’d rather be.

  8

  Same Place, Different Skies

  “Dear Geraldine,

  “Hi!

  “Would you believe I’m so uninformed I hadn’t heard of the government changeover in Australia?” wrote Joannie on January 10, her first letter of 1973. I was used to the historic happenings of my homeland never making a ripple past our own shores. But Joannie had a different excuse for missing the news.

  “I’m sort of shut off from the outside world where I am now—at the hospital. I think I may have mentioned to you a few months ago that I was on a diet—well, I sort of carried it too far.”