Foreign Correspondence (12 page)

It soon became clear that there wouldn’t be any epistolary discussion of French philosophers. Janine wrote that she preferred “adventure books.” But what really shocked me was the arrested state of her knowledge of popular culture. Janine had never heard of my heroes
du jour
, Leonard Cohen and Dustin Hoffman. Her knowledge of modern music ended with the Beatles. When I asked her about French cinema, she replied that she adored Brigitte Bardot. She had seen no Jean Renoir, no François Truffaut.

I stared at the charming valediction, “I kiss you on the two cheeks,” and wondered at the paradox of one so French yet so unsophisticated.

In one letter Janine opined that the Côte d’Azur youths who experimented with drugs
sont idiots
. Since I was avidly tending the seedlings that had sprouted from my marijuana seeds, I found her views on this subject
pas sympathique
. Engaging as she
was, Janine was no alter ego. Or at least not that year. I was longing to taste life and push limits, and I couldn’t understand anyone my age who didn’t feel the same.

But corresponding with Janine had done wonders for my cultural cringe. Sydney, it seemed, was nowhere near as cut off from the world as St. Martin de la Brasque. I began to consider that I might not be so close to the ends of the earth as I had always imagined.

7

Which Side Are you On?

“Today’s the day Nixon (aargh!) became President,” wrote Joannie in her first letter of 1969. “We had to watch it in school 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 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.