Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (finding audrey .TXT) 📗

the White Man” under its masthead. The atmosphere had been so racist that the immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, could summarize his opposition to Asian migrants with quips such as “Two Wongs don’t make a white.”

The exclusion was enforced by a “dictation test” administered to any nonwhite migrant who somehow made it to Australia’s shores. The test wasn’t, as might seem likely, to measure a would-be migrant’s proficiency in English. If the immigration officer didn’t think the migrants looked white enough, the test could be administered in Gaelic, Latin or Icelandic—any language that would doom them to failure and deportation.

But by wartime there weren’t enough British or Irish migrants to satisfy the labor needs of the growing country, and so a few more exotic people began to slip through the net. Immigration officers were told to select those who were “sixty percent European in appearance and outlook”—whatever that meant.

We called these first non-Anglo-Celtic migrants “Balts” no matter where in northern or eastern Europe they actually came from. Blond, blue-eyed, they were easy enough to get used to, once one got over the annoyance of their funny accents. The “Eye-Ties”—the large wave of Italians, Greeks and other southern European immigrants that followed the Balts—were more conspicuous with their dark complexions and pungent foods, and were met with more racism. It wasn’t until 1965 that the “White Australia” policy was abandoned. Most Australians came to accept, sometimes grudgingly, that diversity was actually making the place more interesting. Now, racism expresses itself in debates over the number of immigrants wanted, rather than what color they should be.

My mother embraced the newcomers much sooner than the rest of the neighbors did. She befriended the lonely migrant women and worked on their English, and when she found they were being ripped off doing piecework for a pittance, she helped them use Australian labor laws to get a fairer deal. She became the children’s advocate in their inevitable clashes between the ways of the adopted country and the abandoned one. When the Greek across the road lost his job at a car plant because his flight home from a family funeral had been delayed a day, my mother got on the phone and badgered the foreman into rehiring him. When the bachelor who lived over the back fence talked of returning to Turkey to find a suitable bride, my mother tried to figure ways to introduce him to “a nice Australian girl.”

I loved the new world that these people opened up for me: the decadence of being offered a tiny glass of slivovitz by the Serbs on Sunday mornings, the gothic grieving of the Greeks when a distant cousin died, sipping tea in ornate cups from the Russian spinster’s samovar, the strong tastes of black beans and chili oil brought by the Chinese and the arias that would burst unexpectedly from the Italian.

And yet the fact that they had come to Australia devalued them in my eyes. Why would anyone leave Rome or Athens or Beirut or Leningrad? Italy had scary terrorists, Greeks had military dictatorships, the Middle East had wars, the Russians had brave dissidents. To me, the banal certainty of three meals on the table, a steady job and stable politics seemed a pallid swap. My pen pals were still out there, amid the danger and the culture. So it was to them that I continued to look for my lifeline to the world.

The culture I particularly envied was French. One dull Sunday afternoon Darleen swooped down and swept me off to a Rodin exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was the first art I had ever seen up close. I gazed at Rodin’s desperately heroic Burghers of Calais, his towering Balzac, his delicately entwined Lovers.

From Rodin, I moved on to the Impressionists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Fauves. It was easy to love Cézanne’s landscapes because they so much resembled our own. His clear Provençal light might have been Sydney light; his rock-ribbed hillsides differed only in their extra centuries subdued to the hand of man. At the time, I didn’t realize I loved these paintings because they were showing me a way to look at my own country. I thought I loved them because they showed me a country that was better than mine.

There was a name for this syndrome: Cultural Cringe—the Australian belief that just about anybody anywhere did things better than we did. And no wonder. It was always other people and places we saw reflected in books and movies, never ourselves. I was seventeen before a major Australian novel (Patrick White’s The Tree of Man) elbowed its way onto one of my classroom reading lists. In history, we spent weeks studying the U.S. Civil War, but no time at all on the Australian miners’ rebellion against British troops at the Eureka Stockade. Australians still made few films. Our painters still often used misty European hues rather than the stark palette dictated by Australia’s own crisp light and air.

We didn’t even recognize the gifts of our native plants. One of my chores was sweeping up the pesky brown detritus that fell into our yard from a neighbor’s tree. I didn’t know that the Minié balls I was consigning to the compost were macadamias. These delicious nuts didn’t become famous until an American exported seedlings to Hawaii.

With materials borrowed from Darleen, I began painting. Slowly my palette, easel and pieces of primed Masonite began to take over the space on the back veranda that my science lab had occupied. Instead of copper sulfate solution, dribbles of acrylic paint began to threaten the contents of my mother’s ironing basket.

My artistic inspirations were all French. If Israel represented my craving for risk and adventure, it was France that made me hunger for a culture that was old and arrogant, serene in its own superiority.

In 1968, I finally began to study French at high school. For someone of my temperament, it was an auspicious year to start. I