Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

fried eggs for breakfast; cold cuts in the lunchbox; for dinner, fat-rimmed rump steaks, thick sausages or “lamb’s fry”—liver with bacon and gravy. Fridays, religion ordered us to give the meat a rest, but our fish was deep-fried in crunchy batter. Between meals, there were yummy snacks: bread and “dripping”—lamb fat spooned out of the enamel bowl that caught the drainings from the Sunday roasting pan; or, for a sweet tooth, toffee bubbling like lava until it reached stick-jaw consistency; ice-cold butter balls rolled in a crust of sugar. Now, living in the world of watery tofu and austere dribbles of cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil, I miss the heedless lusciousness of that food.
By the time we returned from Mass, my father would have read both newspapers cover to cover. At the table, he would share the highlights with us. He particularly admired the writing of Ross Campbell, a columnist who never split an infinitive or dangled a participle. Campbell was unusual in those days because his voice was authentically Australian at a time when most newspapers relied on syndicated columns from the British press to fill their space. Most Sundays, something Campbell wrote resonated with our own lives. It was my first childish inkling of the way writing can reveal us to ourselves. It was also my introduction to the notion that Australians had lives that were worth writing about.
He called his house Oxalis Cottage after the rampant cloverlike weed that infested every Sydney suburban garden. He wrote about the vicissitudes of the “mad hour” between breakfast and school departure; the embarrassment of having inferior junk to put out on the curb on Clean-Up days.
He spoke for us in a way no one else did. When a visiting Noel Coward remarked, “I like Australia and I love those wonderful oysters,” Campbell took him to task. “Though he meant it kindly,” Campbell wrote, “Mr. Coward lined himself up with many other visitors who have bestowed praise on the animals here rather than the people.… No people have played second fiddle to their own fauna so much as Australians.” It was bad enough, wrote Campbell, to be upstaged by koalas and kangaroos, but by oysters! “After all, when we go to other countries we take an interest in the people. We don’t say: ‘I liked Scotland. It has such wonderful cows.’ ”
For me, the most interesting of Campbell’s four children was Little Nell, the daughter not much older than I was.
“Listen to this,” said my father. “Sound like someone we know?” He read from the column, as Campbell described trying to tutor Little Nell in math:
“ ‘Three nines?’
“ ‘Wait a minute—it’s nearly on my tongue. Twenty-eight?’
“ ‘No. Three nines are twenty-seven.’
“ ‘I was only one off.’
“ ‘They don’t let you be one off. Three tens?’
“ ‘Thirty,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m good at tens.’ ”
I identified with Little Nell, because arithmetic was the only subject that didn’t come easily to me. I also shared Little Nell’s place in the family as younger sister to a dazzling older sibling. Nell’s sister Theodora was a teenager at a time when teen culture was starting to matter. Like my sister, she was au courant with the latest music and fashions, old enough to scream at the Beatles and to hang out at the city’s new folk clubs. Campbell poked gentle fun at all this. But to me, and I was sure also to my alter ego Little Nell, it was a world of unimaginable, enviable glamor.
One of his columns, called “The Follower,” describing Little Nell’s futile pursuit of Theodora and a visiting friend, could have been written about me and Darleen:
“ ‘They’re mean!’ she said. ‘They’ve locked me out of their room because they’re trying on their bras.’ ”
Like Little Nell, I seemed to spend half my life trying to get a toe into the glamorous wake of my eighteen-year-old sister. Darleen conjured style out of the unpromising air of Concord like a magician producing a bunch of flowers from a sleeve. She seemed to have been born elegant, emerging from the womb with a porcelain complexion and silky hair, while I came out with a head pushed into the shape of a tomahawk and bits of discolored skin hanging off my face. She had actually prayed for my arrival, heading to the church for nine weeks to say a novena to Our Lady to send her a baby sister. I suspect the hapless blob that arrived wasn’t what she’d had in mind. For the first ten years of my life, her attitude to me was one of benign neglect. Our worlds were separated by so much time that we had very little to do with each other.
In the oldest of our family photo albums, there is a rare childhood picture of the two of us together, taken at my sister’s sixth-grade Christmas concert. It is a black and white photograph, but when I look at it I can remember exactly the fairy-floss pink of our matching party dresses. Each of us has a satin bow in her hair—my sister’s pulling back a cascade of long, perfect ringlets. Mine sits askew on a basin-cut bob with a rat-gnawed asymmetry. My eyes, in the photograph, are round and luminous with excitement but my hands—twisting a knot in the skirt of my dress—betray nervousness edging on nausea.
The photographer, of course, isn’t in the picture, but I can still see him as he loomed in front of us, a young man in a dark suit, flash gun in hand. “Point your toe,” he said. I didn’t have the faintest idea what he meant. Darleen did. The camera captures her, in all of her twelve-year-old composure, toe turned out like a prima ballerina. And there I am, my foot flopping spastically, frozen in time as a gawky four-year-old.
The camera loved Darleen. By the time this sixth-grade portrait was taken, she’d already had several years’ experience as a child model. I grew up thinking it was normal to open a newspaper and find a picture of my big sister posed