In the evenings, families in our neighborhood would gather on the front verandas of their houses and wait for the “southerly buster”—the big thunderstorm that would break the heat, lay the dust and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.
I was waiting, too. Waiting for something to happen, and wishing that I lived in a place where something did. Except for relentless coverage of the British royal family, Australian newspapers paid little attention to foreign places. The nightly TV news was more likely to lead with the coliform bacteria count at Bondi Beach than the body count in Vietnam. Yet, at school, our history books were filled with tales of elsewhere. The Great Men—and they were all men, in those days—were British, American, German, French. I was aware from religion class that a few women had made it to greatness via sainthood, but they came from even more distant-sounding places—St. Theresa of Avila, Bernadette of Lourdes. A St. Margaret of Melbourne or a Diane of Dubbo was clearly out of the question.
My father’s escape was the yellow-painted metal mailbox on a post by the privet hedge. Almost every day it contained a letter for him from somewhere else—flimsy aerograms or heavy bond paper with official-looking seals. At the age of ten I learned that it was possible for me, too, to write to strangers and have them write back to me. Suddenly, I could see a way to widen my world by writing away to all the places where I imagined history happened and culture came from. When the letters came back from Vaucluse in France or Maplewood in New Jersey, I studied the foreign images on the stamps and dreamed myself into the lives of the writers.
And now I have their letters again in my hands. I sit in the basement, reading, as the light slowly fades and the surf thuds on the nearby beach. Oldest of all, nibbled around the edges by silverfish, are the letters from my very first pen pal, a twelve-year-old girl nicknamed Nell who lived just across town, and in a different world.
Better preserved are the more recent letters from my American correspondent Joannie, to whom I wrote for more than fifteen years. She became my distant, teenage soulmate and taught me how evanescent, and how enduring, such a friendship can be. Her letters give me glimpses of my girlish self. “Do you know what the control mice died of?” she asks, reminding me of my grandiose and doomed attempt, at the age of fourteen, to alleviate world hunger by proving the edibility of garden weeds. I’d forgotten that I once knew how to write the words “Live Long and Prosper” in the original Vulcan. And did I once call myself by the hideous nickname “Gez”?
The geography of this childhood correspondence has become the road map of the adult life I have lived. Joannie’s letters became a magnet drawing me toward the United States. In 1982, I wrote to tell her I had won a graduate scholarship to the Columbia School of Journalism in New York.
The address of my pen pal in a little village in southern France is only a hundred miles from the other little French village, on the stony, sunlit hillside, where I married in 1984.
In my teens, I wrote to an Arab and a Jew in the Middle East. Twenty-five years later, I arrived in Cairo on a hot autumn night to spend six years covering the Middle East as a reporter. From foreign correspondent to Foreign Correspondent: I have become the envelope full of words flying around the world.
But I know so little about these people who shaped my vision of the world. How has the reality of their lives matched the fantasies I projected on them from the safe harbor of my Sydney girlhood? I begin to wonder if it’s possible to track down forty-year-old adults using only the childish letters they wrote half a lifetime ago. Gently gathering the fragile correspondence with its faded addresses, I decide that one day soon I will try to find out.
2
Return Address
Now, when I do not live there any more, Sydney floats in my imagination like Atlantis. The sunlit harbor is everywhere, its glittering fingers poking into clusters of coral-red roofs.
In the argot of geologists, Sydney is a drowned river valley. The ocean has poured over the ancient pathways of inland waters, flooding the bottomlands and leaving only the high ground exposed. Instead of a gentling from hill to valley to shore, earth and water collide abruptly. Sheer sandstone cliffs confront the glassy breakers of the Pacific, and high knolls plunge straight into deep inlets.
From the air, the land looks like two gnarled hands reaching for each other across a watery abyss. On one finger, the skyscrapers of the central business district rise suddenly like an ostentatious ring. That knot of glitter loosens into a mesh of tiny cottages and terrace houses, then to the sprawl of red-roofed bungalows punctuated by the aqua oblongs of backyard swimming pools. In those backyards, rainbow lorikeets dangle, bright as Christmas lights, from the branches of red gum trees. Winter wattle blooms golden against a crisp blue sky.
This primary-colored paradise is a trick of homesick memory. This Sydney exists, to be sure. But it is not the city in which I grew up. I was born on Bland Street, Ashfield, and the background color of my childhood is the ashy gray of the high, weathered fences that marked out each quarter-acre lot. Summers bleached the backyard grass colorless and dried it until it crunched underfoot. Beyond the fence, our treeless street melted in the sun, the black asphalt bubbling.
We lived in one of the
