Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

just before lunch and it was absolutely repulsive. When Spiro T. Agnew came on screen everybody booed—nobody likes him. Then when Nixon was taking this oath, most everybody clapped but I hissed. My friend and I made this deal that we’re never never NEVER going to call Nixon President. Just plain Nixon, but not P———Nixon.”

If Janine lacked adolescent rage, Joannie had plenty. She was burning mad about the war, about pollution (“Yesterday, air pollution levels were unhealthy for the 64th time this year. Fun”), and about the conservative tilt in American politics.

Joannie was exactly what I’d hoped for in a pen pal: her American life was right in the path of history. Both her brothers had been subject to the draft. One, the molecular biologist, was protected by his academic status, but the other had gone through the tortuous process of declaring himself a conscientious objector. Her sister lived in Berkeley and was friends with the members of Country Joe and the Fish, whose antiwar songs were famous even in Australia.

That year, to my ineffable envy, Joannie took her vacations in San Francisco and London, from whence she dispatched descriptions of the hippies. In Haight-Ashbury, she wrote, “there are lots of bearded guys strolling around in strange outfits. Some of the girls have on minis and some have long embroidered gowns.… They’ve got good views on peace.” In Piccadilly Circus—“is it wild there! … all nationalities and varying degrees of cleanliness … great floppy felt hats are THE fashion there now—not so in America, where it’s sunglasses. What’s up in Australia?”

What was up, for me, was a pair of black faux-satin flared pants that I’d asked the Greek seamstress who lived across the road to make up for me. The pants were so wide around the ankles that the excess fabric flapped in the breeze like a deflated spinnaker. The top half of the outfit consisted of a serape my mother had helped me make out of a square of upholstery brocade with a piece of fringe sewn all around. When I put my head through the hole in the center, I looked like I’d been throttled by a sofa.

Darleen might have saved me from this fashion disaster, but from the distance of Melbourne, she was spared the sight of me. Mrs. Papas, the seamstress, tried her best. A statuesque woman with a high, heavy brow, her dark eyes surveyed me as I tried on the pants and attempted to walk without tripping over the wildly flapping hems. “Why you not let me make you very nice dress?” she said. “Better for you, more pretty.”

But in 1969 I didn’t want to be pretty. I wanted to be mysterious, wild, disheveled, disreputable. One snapshot taken that year perfectly captured my looking-for-trouble mood. I was gazing down, away from the camera, hair falling enigmatically across my face as I tried to achieve the pout of an alienated radical. I liked this picture so much I had copies made and sent them to all my pen pals. Their replies—a diplomatic “Je te trouve très belle” from Janine, a polite “You have a nice hair” from Mishal and a phlegmatic “Don’t worry; you should see some of the pictures that get taken of me” from Joannie—indicated that I would have to work a little harder to achieve the desired impression.

Our inspiring school principal Sister Ruth had gone off on a mission to New York City where she’d spent time working in a literacy program in Harlem. When she returned, she addressed a school assembly. We stood there in the concrete playground, a sea of prim mauve school uniforms, as the summer sun beat down and caused patches of dark sweat to bloom on our backs and under our arms. Sister Ruth talked passionately of the hardships of lives in the ghetto and the courage of the civil rights movement. She wanted us to take from her speech a sense of how lucky we were in our tranquil, privileged country. Instead, I longed to be a Freedom Rider in Montgomery or a Yippie in Chicago.

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