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

had started me down the road to gourmet cooking back in 1966 when she decided that the two of us would make a special dinner to celebrate our parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. The centerpiece of the menu would be duck à l’orange, which would have been unremarkable, except that it was the first thing either of us had ever cooked. It was typical of Darleen’s style: go directly to haute cuisine, do not pass hamburgers.

My great-grandmother, the Boorowa midwife Bridget O’Brien.

My grandmother Phyllis, the most beautiful of the O’Brien girls.

My mother, Gloria, a radio announcer in Canberra.

My mother by a billabong in Boorowa with two of her cousins during the Depression.

Portrait of Gloria Brooks.

My father (standing, second from left) at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, circa 1935.

My father at the microphone at radio station KGMB, Honolulu, where he hosted a show called “Chasing the Blues” in the early 1930s.

Concord, 1961. Setting out for my first day at school.

An evening on the front verandah of the Bland Street, Ashfield, terrace house, 1957.

With my sister, Darleen, at her sixth-grade Christmas concert, 1959.

Nell “Sonny” Campbell (wearing hat) with sister Cressida, 1966.

Mishal at age sixteen, 1971.

Joannie in 1973 just before leaving for Vassar. On the back she writes, “This is a bad picture … makes me look fat.”

Morneen Kamiki, Lawrie Brooks’s most important “pen pal.”

She sent Mum and Dad off to see the romantic French film, A Man and a Woman, while we tried to find the verb in recipe instructions such as “julienne orange zest” and puzzled over the meaning of “deglaze pan.” Our pan was Teflon: it didn’t have a glaze. Somehow, we figured that deglazing involved tossing in some brandy. We’d extinguished the inferno and hidden the evidence by the time our parents returned from the movie.

Later, working weekends as a waitress, I learned how to reduce a stock, how to fillet a fish, how to garnish a plate. I enrolled in cooking classes that were virtually free, thanks to government subsidies, and got to sample creations such as oysters au champagne sabayon, boeuf carbonnade, hay-roasted lamb with hollandaise minceur that were far beyond a student’s budget.

By the time I moved into the Glebe apartment I knew how to turn cheap organ meats into succulent terrines and how to transform the bargains of a morning’s trip to the nearby fish market into delicious meals. I found I could hide my shyness in the role of show-off chef, and the kitchen of my little flat became a favorite haunt of my uni peers. But these were pleasures that I didn’t even dare to broach with Joannie. We were both using food to impose control on an uncertain social world. But my way was through feast and hers through famine.

Somehow, Joannie managed to stay in school through 1977, and it seemed as if we would finish our degrees within months of each other the following year. She was thinking about graduate school; I couldn’t wait to get a job.

I wanted to be a reporter, and I’d laid siege to the largest daily paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, hoping to be one of the half dozen cadet journalists they hired every year. In February 1979, I started work as a cadet on the Herald sports desk.

Cadetship was a one-year purgatory designed to humble university graduates and teach them how to accurately handle reams of small facts. Of all the tasks—compiling the TV guide, monitoring the police radio scanner, writing up the shipping news, reading the sackloads of letters to the editor—the lot of the sports cadet was perhaps the most miserable.

The sports section occupied a pen in a corner of the newsroom, walled off by filing cabinets and gated by a pair of giant, mostly empty wastebaskets. To enter, one had to wade through the calf-deep deposits of trash that hadn’t quite made it into the bins—tomato-sauce-stained meat-pie wrappers, sandwich crusts, coffee cups, cigarette butts, and mounds of crumpled 8-ply—the little booklets of paper interleaved with carbon on which stories were typed, a paragraph per booklet, in those pre-word-processor days.

The sports reporters themselves were a set of hard-drinking, chain-smoking clichés: all men, mostly middle-aged, largely dissipated. Even the few younger ones had incipient beer guts. The most wasted-looking of all were the half dozen racing writers, and these were the men for whom I was assigned to work. My arrival triggered an automatic, too-mindless-to-be-malicious fiesta of bottom-pinching sexual harassment that taught me to move through the section in a kind of sideways crab scuttle: the only way to keep my ass out of reach of roving hands.

The biggest part of my job was to compile the information these men needed in order to pick winners. “Doing the details,” as the job was called, required going to every race meeting—gallops, trotting and, late on Saturday nights, that last resort of the hopeless punter, “the dogs.” On big cardboard file cards, I had to keep detailed records of each runner: where it was at the turn, where at the finish, the condition of the track, the duration of each race, what the betting odds were early in the day, what they went out to, what they were at the race’s start. The work was both mind-numbing and nerve-racking, since some country bookmakers paid out on the Herald’s results and an error could cost thousands.

What made it all worse was the compulsory drinking. I had to travel to and from the track with the racing writers, who always stopped off at the pub on the way back to the office. There, the tyranny of the “shout” meant that everybody was required to buy at least one round of drinks. With five reporters, that meant at least five beers had to be consumed to escape the ignominy of being branded “a gutless sheila who can’t hold her piss” or, worse, “that stuck-up