Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

wake up to the world, only to find it a tragic and perilous place. Girls in my class were seeing their older brothers go reluctantly to Vietnam. The help that Menzies had sent in order to ingratiate himself with Kennedy had burgeoned from a few trainers into a full-scale troop commitment, including conscription. Australia now had CIA spy satellite bases in the Outback that would make us a target in a nuclear war. Life seemed precarious, even in faraway Sydney. To Joannie, the chill of the Cold War was icy.
“Last night around eleven fifteen P.M. the whole sky lit up all over pale orange for a few seconds and then there came the loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard,” Joannie wrote. It was an oil refinery explosion, “but at the moment it happened I was sure that a Bomb had fallen. It was really scary because I was so sure of it that I was almost wondering to myself, ‘How much longer am I going to be alive?’ We could see the flames from our second floor.… Afterwards I realized that had it been a bomb I wouldn’t have been alive, because the ones they have today are so powerful to destroy everything far beyond twenty miles from New York, which is appx. where we are.”
In “Star Trek’s” optimistic scenario, we had survived the twentieth century. The Cold War was over, because the Russian, Pavel Checkov—“Keptin! Keptin! The Klingon ship is wery close!”—was part of the Enterprise crew. Race didn’t matter, because a black woman was communications officer. Humanity’s face in the twenty-third century was a reassuringly benign one.
But Joannie and I had to live in 1968, and as the year drew to a close it was the day-to-day reality of our own times, rather than the weekly escapism of “Star Trek,” that began to occupy our correspondence.
Joannie sent me a poster: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I pinned it up over my desk and sent her an Australian Vietnam Moratorium button, a red badge with white Vs radiating from the center that had become the popular symbol of opposition to the war. I wrote passionately of my antiwar beliefs, and questioned her about her politics.
“Yes,” she wrote back, “I am a Eugene J. McCarthy supporter. I was very disappointed that McCarthy wasn’t nominated. Such a horrible choice—Nixon and Humphrey! America is deteriorating.” Since this was also my father’s view, I had no doubt it was correct.
My father had turned his back on America with the same finality with which he had ended his singing career. He viewed the country of his birth the way a parent views a child who has grown up to be a disappointment. Through his eyes, I saw the California of his childhood as a golden place, full of promise. But materialism and overdevelopment had ruined it. In Sydney, he saw the unspoiled Los Angeles of his youth. He despised the Darwinistic individualism of the United States. His views were a much more comfortable fit with the cooperative, collectivist spirit of the Aussies he’d met in the Outback, in the army, and at his job in the trade-union-dominated printing industry.
Ever since he quit singing in 1961 his life had been bracketed by a dreary, hourlong bus commute to an eight-to-four proofreading job. But he never seemed restless in his workaday routine. He loved the English language; he took grammar and spelling errors personally. He crusaded for the correct usage of words like “decimate” and “juggernaut.” To say “centered around” rather than “centered on” was to invite a lecture. All through school, I felt torn about whether to give him my essays to proofread. I knew he would catch every error. On the other hand, his indelicately scrawled proofreader’s hash marks would mean I had to make the effort of rewriting the paper.
I think he also felt contented in his job because the men he worked with at the newspaper were his ex-army buddies and fellow musicians—his mates. It’s hard to convey the freight carried by that loaded Australian word. It signifies a singular, fierce friendship between man and man that doesn’t seem to exist in quite the same form in any other country. Reams have been written about Aussie mateship: its origins in the cruelties of convict life when six of every seven prisoners were men; its tempering by the hardships of isolated Outback settlement; its parasitic effect on male-female intimacy; its tendency to promote a particularly vicious, defensive brand of homophobia. But I think that for my father it was mostly a good thing, a surrogate for all the different kinds of man-to-man relationships his own upbringing hadn’t provided.
Although his grandmother was a kindly woman, the big house in Santa Maria was a lonely place for a little boy. Ronald, his only sibling, had died at fifteen months, when my father was just two weeks old. All his life, my father was tormented by the possibility that his arrival had caused his parents to neglect his brother’s signs of illness. With his father gone, brother dead and grandfather austerely distant, his one friend was a large orange cat named Silver. There is a picture of my father, a sad-eyed little boy, clutching the cat, rubbing his face into its fur. Not long after the photo was taken, the cat fell into a rainwater barrel and drowned.
Over the years, his mother worked her way through a series of husbands that included card sharks and moonshiners. When he was allowed to visit, he learned that one way to avoid abuse from these men was to be quick when the police arrived. His job was to grab the lid of the still and make off with it into the woods. If the still wasn’t intact, the police couldn’t prove that moonshining was under way. No matter how awful each visit, at the end of it Lawrie would beg his mother to let him stay with her. She always turned him down.