Whole Wild World (2 page)

Tomislav seemed grand for a punk and too exotic for a kid in Australia. I traded under Tommy until it seemed infantile and became Tom towards the end of primary school. Boris would have been a stretch for us all, especially me.

We had recently settled in Belmore, in Sydney's southwestern suburbs, in a three-bedroom house in Chalmers Street that could grow to five if the living areas were rented out to tenants, which was not unusual. Single men and women, rarely couples, stayed for weeks or years. The arrangements were fluid: share house, boarding house, emergency landing pad. Much to her annoyance, just like in Croatia, Milenka was expected to cook for everyone, and people came and went according to factory shifts.

My mother's sister Danica had migrated in 1960, soon after my parents married. Ship delays meant Teta, as we called her, missed the wedding by a few weeks; the bride and groom dressed up again for Danica and to take pictures to send back to Croatia. In family albums there's a picture of me as a two-month-old baby on my parents' bed. I'm frocked like a girl in frilly bits. My eyes are slightly crossed, arms out, hands tightly closed. I was ready to rumble. (Teta, who professed expertise in infant semiotics, maintained my clenched baby hands were an omen for being tight with money or not wanting to share stuff with Å ime, her favourite.)

There was shuffling about in the household because I did not settle at night. A deep-voiced female cousin who was staying with us was able to comfort me, Anka's soothing low-end murmur in contrast to Mama's high pitch. According to family lore, the blond man who rode a motorcycle to an early-morning job, and always wore a black leather jacket, was the first to bail due to excessive noise. He was called Žuti, which translates to ‘yellow'. I thought he lacked courage in adversity, but no, it was all about his fair complexion.

Nicknames were common in our community, given so many men were called Ante (Anthony), Marko (Mark) and Mate (Matthew) or were on the run. Joso (pronounced yo-so) and Å ime (she-meh) are ubiquitous on both sides of the family, not because of a lack of imagination, but because they're bloody good, solid names. Our wider clan includes a Dado, Bepo, Yoya, Geza, Micho, Maza, Chicho and Charlie. And just like Brazilian soccer players, those handles had no resemblance to actual names, but were permanent nevertheless.

Women were typically variants of Marija, our way for Mary or Maria. To make gossip possible, Marias were sorted by home village, appearance or scandal. Maria could be prefixed by ‘your', ‘our' or ‘my', depending on who was speaking. We had Baba Maria, Uncle Joe's Maria, Black Maria, Little Maria, Maria from Arbanasi, Kuma Maria, Tia Maria, Two Husbands Poor Maria, Three Daughters Lucky Maria, Farmer's Wife Maria, Crippled Maria. Ave Maria! After a falling out a couple of Marias were never politely mentioned again. There were different designations for Tata's and Mama's sides of the family, and variations within. Aunts, for instance, could be
strina
,
ujna
or
teta
. Get it wrong and you'd never see another chocolate block.

To non-Croatians, my father Joso was Joe (but on immigration cards he was recorded as ‘Jozo'). Bizarrely, at least to my ears, Mama always called Tata ‘Dušević'. It's pronounced Du
sh
evi
ch
, which will give you an idea of how to sound out the Croatian ‘š' and ‘ć'. When he went to school my brother was called Sam, a lucky break because Simeon or Simon would have trapped him in no man's land, names our parents would have struggled with outside the home.

Å ime was a runner, with fugitive in the blood, as fast as any two-year-old with chunky thighs and girl's sandals could be. On excursions to the shops, our pregnant mother put a harness on him, and a short leash. He'd been born in the inner-city suburb of
Newtown, into a huge share house in Alice Street that my father had bought in the mid-1950s. Å ime was used to playing with, being held by and being around adults, many of whom were just off the boat or plane from Croatia.

Their world was centred on Sydney's inner city. They went to Mass at St Peter's in Surry Hills and there was a Croatian hall or
dom
near there. My parents walked or used trams, but for big trips they'd book taxis. Šime would stand on a box in the front yard at Alice Street, across the road from the Pick Me Up food factory, calling ‘Tat-si, tat-si' as my parents waited inside. When the cab arrived they'd make a fuss about how Šime alone had summoned the driver.

My parents wanted space to breathe, especially a garden to grow vegetables and a yard for Å ime to play in, and bought the house in Belmore, ten stops from Central on the Bankstown railway line. Belmore was a well-established working-class suburb of detached houses, mainly California bungalows and post- Federation cottages. It attracted Greeks, Italians and other migrants, many like my parents fleeing a squalid inner city to pursue traditional Mediterranean lifestyles: growing olives and grapes, bottling tomato sauce, making wine and fortified spirits and feuding with neighbours. Still, there were enough entrenched Anglo-Celts to stuff the Catholic schools, control the local councils and fill out the backline for the Berries, as the local rugby league team was then known.

Our block of land may as well have had its own postcode. If hide-and-seek was in the Olympics this was your training venue. You could never be bored in such a backyard, bendable to every kind of mischief. Down one side of the yard were five evenly spaced palm trees. Dead branches, spiky and weighty, dropped from the sky. Orange-coloured seeds were littered around trunks so big you needed four kids joining hands to encircle them.

We were as resourceful with palm bounty as Indigenous
Australians. Nothing was ever wasted, and there was a season for every part. The long, green palm fronds were used as roofs for cubby houses and lean-tos. The bulbous dry husks were fashioned into weapons such as mallets; seeds became ammunition for slingshots or thrown like tiny missiles.

These gigantic palms rested over a flat, grassed area the width of two cricket pitches and the length of one. It was here that men sat on old crates and chairs to drink, smoke and talk into the night, or came to play bocce on Sundays and after work in summer. There were play yards for us at the front and sides, as well as a front veranda that wrapped around to catch the afternoon's gift of shade.

The palms gave the joint extra pizzazz, and a resort-like feel, perfect for parties. People were drawn to it. Photos from my christening show an occasion with only a few kids, big cousins like Blanka and Jure, and Å ime. But in those snaps there are many single men and women, some of whom will marry each other and have their own families.

An off-white picket fence stood before a thick green hedge at the front. Behind a gate, a slightly curved path took you to the front door. There were two swing gates for the side driveway. My parents would go to great lengths to keep the gates closed, elaborately tying wire around the bolt locks. It was tedious for them and anyone visiting, but absolutely necessary to keep their little runaway inside the fortress. He should have been kitted out in an orange suit for easy tracking.

‘Did we used to have a dog?' I asked Mama a few years later as I was rummaging through a cupboard, a hint of panic forming about being mauled by a mutt.

‘No, never,' she said.

‘Oh yeah, then what's this?' I demand, holding up a worn, white leather device, buckles still shiny silver.

‘That's the harness I had to use on Šime when I was pushing
you in the pram. He always wanted to get away. It was the only thing that worked and I had to fight him to put it on.'

Our house was a street away from St Joseph's Catholic primary school. When children were in the playground, a constant buzz permeated the neighbourhood, like the lid taken off a can of Spring Bliss. Naturally, this was a siren song for Å ime. One morning, when he was three, Å ime went missing. My parents checked the house, yards, outside dunny and laundry, vegetable garden and shed.

No luck, some concern.

My father jumped in the car to look for him. He found Šime at the school fence, on his toes, shorts riding up above his belly, straining to see the children, hoping to join their games. Tata said when he arrived my brother was speaking to the kids, although in those days Šime only knew Croatian. Unlike me, he'd been slow to start talking. Before becoming a taxi caller, he'd communicated by pointing and uttering ‘eeee, eeee' with various degrees of urgency and frustration.

Who knows how often he slipped the net, making it home without being missed? Maybe he had connections on the outside. One time, Å ime turned up at the front door with a white-haired woman in tow. The story goes she found him on top of the wooden bridge over the railway line halfway between Belmore and Lakemba stations, almost a kilometre away. He'd been watching the trains come and go.

Å ime then led her back to Chalmers Street, which is a lot of steps for an old lady. In those days, I stayed put and could reliably be found clutching my mother's leg. I didn't trust these people not to run away from me.

Escapes were the family business. My parents were refugees, having separately fled Tito's regime in the 1950s. World War II destroyed their youth, and war's bitter and complicated aftermath split their families. It brought them to Australia, impoverished, as displaced persons.

But before the tumult, Joso and Milenka had the firmest of foundations. Born in 1924, they were children from large clans in idyllic coastal villages in Dalmatia. Croatia was then a part of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which itself had come out of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. The city that was the focal point of their families was Zadar, which Italy had long desired for its splendour and commercial potential. A 1920 treaty between the two kingdoms led to the creation of ‘Zara', an Italian enclave that included nearby districts and several islands.

There were ethnic Croatians now living in Italy and Italians in Croatian territory. Families from the Velebit mountains to the Adriatic Sea were functionally bilingual, and the native language was bastardised, a stew of dialects. History was a living thing, politics were complicated and identity was fluid. But my people had sheep to herd, fish to catch, groves to tend, fields to plough, wine to drink and a multitude of children to count and feed.

Born in 1924 to Ive and Lucija Dušević, Joso was the third child, after sister Matija and brother Šime. Sisters Anka and Vesela came later. It was a small family by the standards of the day in Ljubač, a village overlooking a placid bay some 16 kilometres from Zadar. My grandfather had four brothers and they worked the fields. While all had their own houses, during the day their wives prepared meals and the children were reared in one large familial home; in the evening there were forty people to be fed, and games, singing, stories. All the Duševićs were lean – genes, farm work and just-enough food – but Joso was on the tall side. His nickname was
studento
, the student.

Joso was fourteen when he left home to go to a trade school; he was apprenticed to a shopkeeper in a cathedral town called Ðakovo, in Slavonija in eastern Croatia, some 500 kilometres away, about the same distance by road as Venice. He learned the basics of bookkeeping, inventory and shop craft.

Joso didn't see his family again until he was nineteen. His own mother didn't recognise him when he returned to the village in the latter stages of the war. He spoke differently and his time away had fostered political interests. The civil war in Yugoslavia had come into the districts around Zadar, and Joso was obliged to choose between Tito's Partizane or the Ustaše of the independent Croatian state. It wasn't a simple choice for some in his family. In Zadar, his sister Matija had been beaten and mistreated by Il Duce's fascists, allied to the Ustaše. She and her husband Miro committed themselves to the partisans.

Joso's heart was with the nationalists, a few of whom he knew through family ties. So he joined the fight in 1944, unsuited as he was to army life and combat. Tito's forces prevailed and Joso ended up back on the family farm.

‘In June 1947 commo authorities arrested me and soon after they sentenced me to three-and-a-half years' prison,' he said, according to an English translation of a
biografija
written for migration authorities. He was charged with spreading ‘anti-commo propaganda'.

After his ‘liberation' Joso returned to Ljubač. Not knowing what to do with him after his release, the communists drafted him into the Yugoslav army, the outfit he had fought against for the final year of the war. Joso worked in the port city of Rijeka, or Fiume, as the Italians knew it. Again, he was summoned to barracks. On a forty-six-day army stint, he found himself on border duties in the far north of the country around the Free Territory of Trieste, as it was then. In 1947 the area had been divided into Zone A and Zone B, controlled,
respectively, by the allied forces and the Yugoslav Army.