Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks

Author:Geraldine Brooks [Brooks, Geraldine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Autobiography, Travel, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780385483735
Google: zoK7xw8u0TYC
Amazon: 0385483732
Barnesnoble: 0385483732
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1998-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Earlier that month I had finally walked through the big stone gates of Sydney University. I’d arrived there brimming with confidence, proud of good exam results.

But the exhilaration didn’t last long. Drifting from one big anonymous lecture hall to the other, I soon felt lost and lonely at the university. My Bland Street school had been a safe, intimate environment full of people just like me—same gender, same socioeconomic level, same religious background. The vast arts faculty of the University of Sydney was a different story. I had thought I would love the diversity, but instead I felt overwhelmed by it. I was in awe of the students from the private schools of the North Shore and the eastern suburbs who seemed to have so much poise and polish. I wasn’t sure how to act in front of the young men in my classes. The English department was huge; the fine arts department snobbish.

The only place I felt comfortable was the government department. I’d taken the subject as an afterthought because Duff had said it had good lecturers. Many of them were Americans—disenchanted veterans of the 1960s culture wars. One, who described himself as a “Lyndon Johnson Canadian,” had left his country to dodge the draft.

But my shyness made it an ordeal to speak up in tutorials. I might have gone through the year in silence if it hadn’t been for the only-in-Australia custom of some of the younger tutors, who liked to hold their tutorials in the beer gardens of the various pubs near the uni. I soon found that a swiftly downed boiler-maker made it possible for me to barge into any discussion without inhibition. Because of Australians’ cultural acceptance of drinking—even of drinking to excess—it never occurred to me to question what I was doing.

But even with the alcohol buffer, the university became bleaker as the seasons changed. In late summer, when the lawns were still covered with clusters of students laughing together or arguing over their books, I had been able to imagine myself eventually becoming part of such a group. But as the cooler weather drove the students inside and rain stripped the foliage from the sycamores, I wandered alone from class to class over the slick, blackened leaves and despaired of ever finding a friend.

“Snap out of it! You don’t know how lucky you are.” My mother, the voice of reason, had little patience with my moroseness. “When I was a kid I was so shy I didn’t just have trouble speaking to strangers—I used to cross the street so I wouldn’t have to say hello to people I knew.” My mother had dealt with her shyness by getting a job in radio, where she spoke to thousands of strangers at a time. Her prescription was simple: find the thing you are most afraid of, then go and do it.

I was afraid to be noticed, to speak up in public. The last time I’d visited Darleen in Melbourne, she’d had a photographer friend from the advertising agency take some nice pictures of me.

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