Foreign Correspondence (17 page)

An evening on the front verandah of the Bland Street, Ashfield, terrace house, 1957.

With my sister, Darleen, at her sixth-grade Christmas concert, 1959.

Nell “Sonny” Campbell (wearing hat) with sister Cressida, 1966.

Mishal at age sixteen, 1971.

Joannie in 1973 just before leaving for Vassar. On the back she writes, “This is a bad picture … makes me look fat.”

Morneen Kamiki, Lawrie Brooks’s most important “pen pal.”

She sent Mum and Dad off to see the romantic French film,
A Man and a Woman
, while we tried to find the verb in recipe instructions such as “julienne orange zest” and puzzled over the meaning of “deglaze pan.” Our pan was Teflon: it didn’t have a glaze. Somehow, we figured that deglazing involved tossing in some brandy. We’d extinguished the inferno and hidden the evidence by the time our parents returned from the movie.

Later, working weekends as a waitress, I learned how to reduce a stock, how to fillet a fish, how to garnish a plate. I enrolled in cooking classes that were virtually free, thanks to government subsidies, and got to sample creations such as oysters
au champagne sabayon, boeuf carbonnade
, hay-roasted lamb with
hollandaise minceur
that were far beyond a student’s budget.

By the time I moved into the Glebe apartment I knew how to turn cheap organ meats into succulent terrines and how to transform the bargains of a morning’s trip to the nearby fish market into delicious meals. I found I could hide my shyness in the role of show-off chef, and the kitchen of my little flat became a favorite haunt of my uni peers. But these were pleasures that I didn’t even dare to broach with Joannie. We were both using food to impose control on an uncertain social world. But my way was through feast and hers through famine.

Somehow, Joannie managed to stay in school through 1977, and it seemed as if we would finish our degrees within months of each other the following year. She was thinking about graduate school; I couldn’t wait to get a job.

I wanted to be a reporter, and I’d laid siege to the largest
daily paper, the
Sydney Morning Herald
, hoping to be one of the half dozen cadet journalists they hired every year. In February 1979, I started work as a cadet on the
Herald
sports desk.

Cadetship was a one-year purgatory designed to humble university graduates and teach them how to accurately handle reams of small facts. Of all the tasks—compiling the TV guide, monitoring the police radio scanner, writing up the shipping news, reading the sackloads of letters to the editor—the lot of the sports cadet was perhaps the most miserable.

The sports section occupied a pen in a corner of the newsroom, walled off by filing cabinets and gated by a pair of giant, mostly empty wastebaskets. To enter, one had to wade through the calf-deep deposits of trash that hadn’t quite made it into the bins—tomato-sauce-stained meat-pie wrappers, sandwich crusts, coffee cups, cigarette butts, and mounds of crumpled 8-ply—the little booklets of paper interleaved with carbon on which stories were typed, a paragraph per booklet, in those pre-word-processor days.

The sports reporters themselves were a set of hard-drinking, chain-smoking clichés: all men, mostly middle-aged, largely dissipated. Even the few younger ones had incipient beer guts. The most wasted-looking of all were the half dozen racing writers, and these were the men for whom I was assigned to work. My arrival triggered an automatic, too-mindless-to-be-malicious fiesta of bottom-pinching sexual harassment that taught me to move through the section in a kind of sideways crab scuttle: the only way to keep my ass out of reach of roving hands.

The biggest part of my job was to compile the information these men needed in order to pick winners. “Doing the details,” as the job was called, required going to every race meeting—gallops, trotting and, late on Saturday nights, that last resort of the hopeless punter, “the dogs.” On big cardboard file cards, I had to keep detailed records of each runner: where it was at the
turn, where at the finish, the condition of the track, the duration of each race, what the betting odds were early in the day, what they went out to, what they were at the race’s start. The work was both mind-numbing and nerve-racking, since some country bookmakers paid out on the
Herald
’s results and an error could cost thousands.

What made it all worse was the compulsory drinking. I had to travel to and from the track with the racing writers, who always stopped off at the pub on the way back to the office. There, the tyranny of the “shout” meant that everybody was required to buy at least one round of drinks. With five reporters, that meant at least five beers had to be consumed to escape the ignominy of being branded “a gutless sheila who can’t hold her piss” or, worse, “that stuck-up uni sheila who thinks she’s too bloody good to down a beer with us.” Buffering my nervousness at the university had already made me a fierce drinker: I kept frosted glasses in the refrigerator for the perfectly mixed martinis that lubricated my lingering social awkwardness. But the drinking of the sportswriters was a new league in which I had no desire to compete. When I left the pub, my grandest ambition was to make it upright to the huge gray
Herald
building rotating through space on the other side of the road.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of world-changing reporting I’d imagined, and I lived for the day of the three-month assignment changeover, when I’d be sent to a paradise such as the letters page. When the assignments finally went up on the newsroom notice board and I saw that I’d been condemned to another three months in the sports section, I almost resigned on the spot.

To stay sane, I’d started writing unsolicited features for the paper’s soft underbellies, the Home Section and the Weekend magazine. On the day one of these—a pensée about the Ice Age in my undefrosted freezer—appeared, I suddenly got a summons from the
Herald
’s editor-in-chief, otherwise known as
God. Nobody I knew had ever seen him. Omnipotent yet invisible, the editor-in-chief communicated only by memos. I’d had one of these on a previous story—a one-liner saying he’d found the piece “readable.”

The summons to his office arrived just as I’d returned from an afternoon at the racetrack. I wasn’t exactly dressed for success. Dust crusted my wind-blown hair, manure rimmed my sensible sneakers, and a dribble of meat-pie gravy and tomato sauce traveled in a Jackson Pollockesque splatter across the front of my dress. For fragrance, I was wearing that unmistakable eau-de-pub medley of stale tobacco and beer. In a panic, I rushed across the newsroom to the fashion section and threw myself on the mercy of the cadet assigned there. In the staff bathroom, she scrubbed me off, made me up and loaned me her high-heeled burgundy boots, in which I tottered off to meet God.

David Bowman had the face of a kindly boy, topped by a mop of prematurely silvered hair. After a brief comment on that day’s article and a polite query on the state of my shorthand (cadets were supposed to reach a hundred words a minute before they could pass out of trainee status) he dismissed me. Relieved that I hadn’t been sacked for muddling the odds on some greyhound, I left the office baffled as to why Captain Memo, as Bowman was also nicknamed, hadn’t simply put it in writing.

The next morning the sports editor waved me into his cubicle. This gruff, taciturn man had barely said a word to me since I’d joined his section. He looked up over the heavy black rims of his glasses. “Want you round in features,” he barked, and returned his attention to the pile of 8-ply on his desk.

And so I found myself vaulted into one of the best jobs on the paper, writing everything from celebrity profiles to investigations of toxic waste dumps. Suddenly I had a real salary and an office with art on the walls.

• • •

“We’re starting a scholarship to send an Australian reporter to study at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York,” David Bowman told me one day. The scholarship was being created to memorialize Greg Shackleton, a young reporter who had been killed by the Indonesian army while covering the invasion of East Timor. “I really think you should apply.” This, I realized, might be my Big Trip. New York for a year would be perfect. And I would know someone there.