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

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 overnight. 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.”

I hadn’t bothered to look at the envelope. But there in the top corner was the return address: Memorial Unit, Yale-New Haven Hospital. Joannie wrote that she had collapsed three days before Christmas and arrived at the hospital emergency room “unconscious, dehydrated, in shock, and with a blood pressure of 40/?”

Almost three weeks later she was, she wrote, “a lot better, am up and around and gaining weight, but still I will probably be here for 3 months or so.”

It sounded like an odd sort of hospital. “There are a lot of other patients my age, including some very nice