Whole Wild World (3 page)

On frontier patrol near the port of Koper on a moonless night, Joso distracted the Serbian soldier he was on duty with. Joso claimed he'd heard a noise and went to check; I'm not ruling out the use of a really bad, albeit tactical, joke. Joso fled across the border, a short, if heterodox, journey from B to A. As he later told migration officials, his heart wasn't in wearing the uniform, let alone fighting for, the Red Stars of Belgrade.

Joso had been a soldier with a bad attitude, given to small acts of rebellion and large licks of lip. The partisan army chief, who would have to account for a human debit, was probably glad this nogoodnik was off the books.

On 1 December 1953, Joso was picked up by American GIs, who were operating under the banner of TRUST (Trieste United States Troops). He surrendered his weapon and was placed in the cramped San Sabba refugee camp in Trieste; Nazis had used the site to execute dissidents and as a transit place for Jews who would be exterminated at Auschwitz. When he was declared stateless, Joso was asked to provide three preferences for resettlement: the US (where there were pre-war, pioneering relatives), Canada (where his cousin Joso, a doctor, had gone) and Australia, third choice, almost off the charts at the end of the world. In his immigration records Joso (Displaced Person 11905) declares he is an enemy of the Belgrade regime.

‘In no way I intend to return,' he'd written, according to the translation of his personal history for immigration officials. ‘I'd be sentenced to death.'

The Australian immigration official in Rome liked the look of this 1.77-metre, 75-kilogram DP, according to the interview notes he made in September 1954. Thirty years. Claims to be experienced farmer. Knows little Italian. Good clean type. Strong. Blue eyes. Accept.

Joso would come as an assisted migrant under the Italo–
Australian agreement struck in 1951. He gave an undertaking to remain in government-approved employment for two years, to pay back his assisted passage costs to the Commonwealth if he didn't stick it out for two years and to endeavour to learn English. My father relinquished any right to nominate friends or relatives for migration.

Joso was the first of many in the Dušević clan to make it to Australia. He arrived in Sydney in October 1954 after a thirteen- stop KLM flight from Milan over several days. Joso cursed the southern sun but the summery languor of the place reminded him of home. Still, he feared he'd never learn the language: these people spoke without opening their mouths. After a stint in the Bonegilla migrant camp, and labouring jobs, he headed for the cane fields of Far North Queensland. When the slow train from Sydney reached Brisbane a worn-out Joso gave thanks; it was another two days before he got to Innisfail.

He cut sugarcane at Silkwood, near Tully. Although he'd toiled on the family farm and was designated fit by immigration doctors to do ‘heavy work', harvesting was back-breaking labour and he hated the humidity of the tropics. He'd go to the pub on Saturday but didn't splurge his money on gin, which some of his mates in the work gang seemed to consume intravenously in the bunk house. Joso lasted a single season but had saved enough for a home deposit by then.

He started work at the Kellogg's cereal factory and became a fixture there. As he'd boast: ‘Everybody know two-seven-oh, hard-working Joe!'

Sydney's Croatian community in those days was minuscule. There had been previous waves of migration from Dalmatia, people now so comfortable in their surroundings and long-settled that they had English names such as Richard and Elizabeth, their surnames ended in ‘ich'. They identified as Yugoslavs, having missed the whole Croatian nationalist movement of the 1920s.

Joso was among the postwar pioneers in the community. Everything they did was grassroots. They got the ball rolling on the Croatia Sydney soccer club ( Joso was in charge of setting up the goal nets and keeping them in good nick), a Croatian- language newspaper, musical and folkloric groups, language schools, dances and social clubs. It was an energetic, fast-growing community in a stable time in Australia, but its grievances and insecurities also kept it insular.

Milenka was from the Lukin family of Kali, on the island of Ugljan, home to fishermen who drop their nets and lines all over the world. Her father was Bartolomeo (or Bare) and her mother was, naturally, Marija. My grandparents had eleven children but most of those would die in infancy and childhood. Only four grew into adulthood and Milenka, born ninth, was the youngest of them. Her older sisters were Milica, who had married in Milenka's infancy, and Danica. Her brother was Vencislav (Venko).

My mother alone knew the birth order. Milenka was the keeper of family and village memory, carrying the honour roll of lost boys and girls with her through life. She had only a few years of education because she was needed on the plots of land the family owned on the island and on the nearby mainland. Milenka would row 5 kilometres from Kali to Zadar to work in the fields and look after animals in an Italian-held area called Crno (meaning ‘black').

Bare Lukin was a builder, church belltowers being a specialty and a bit of an indulgence on the part of some villages where parishioners often ran out of money with the tower only halfway to the sky. He'd been in the Austro-Hungarian military and spent part of his youth in Peking after the Boxer Rebellion at the dawn of the twentieth century.

‘We probably have brothers and sisters in China,' Teta Danica used to say without fierce judgement and a hint of humour, a moment rarer than an eclipse, lunar or solar. ‘He was a young man far from home for twenty-four months. You couldn't blame him if he had gone with one of the local girls.'

His son and grandsons were drawn to maritime careers, while his daughters, in time, made sea voyages even further away than China.

The Allies bombed Zadar pitilessly during World War II, often shelling the adjacent islands. The Lukins built shelters in remote caves and spent countless nights in the cold; for good measure, Italian soldiers stole livestock and destroyed houses in retribution, suspecting the
boduli
, or island folk, were harbouring partisans. Which was technically true, but the approach of Il Duce's pocket-sized Calabrese and Sicilians on tour was deemed over the top and worthy of vendetta. Danica never forgave them or spoke well of Italians, even those she met in Australia.

But they burned down twenty houses in Kali!

By the end of the war Milenka was twenty-one. Many of the young men she knew had been killed or were missing, feared dead. Venko, a ship's captain, now had small children, while Danica, a clever and patient weaver and seamstress, was living in Split.

Milenka's options were limited. Logically, she turned to crime, or entrepreneurship, as it is now called. She became an olive oil smuggler, buying/carting/selling contraband from town to town. Balancing the twenty-litre oil urn on her head, shoulders back and spine straight, she'd go about her shady business. Tourists and soldiers, aping
Life
magazine photojournalists on ethnographic jaunts, would take pictures of Milenka and her friends as they carried their wares. In smugglers' dens and discreet farmhouses, she'd compare field notes with other young women in this illicit trade. Whenever Milenka talked about those days she'd drop into sly-girl mode, a sparkle in her eye, a flash of a gold incisor beneath a smile.

She understood the flaws in the rules (such as they were) of local commerce, calculated the risk, sized up the competition and jumped into the market. It brought hard currency into the family, and perhaps a bit on the side for her export plan. By her early thirties, Milenka was living in Rijeka, in the north of Croatia, where her future husband had once worked. There were other people from Kali in those parts, including her best friend Rajka Kolega. Rajka was busted by officials when she let slip she had actually paid a farmer for the oil she was carrying. If she had lied, by claiming it was from her family's farm, albeit some 300 kilometres away in Kali, she would have avoided prosecution. Years earlier, and closer to home, the two women had spun elaborate stories about their cargo whenever stopped by the reviled Italian military-style finance police, the Corpo della Regia Guardia di Finanza, which operated in the Zadar area pre-war.

Milenka had resented the Finanza's arbitrary law- enforcement and now abhorred the way Tito's party hacks were elevated to positions of authority. Compared with Russia, Yugoslavia was portrayed by some as a worker's paradise, built on brotherhood and Adriatic majesty. To most Croatians, however, it was oppressive and corrupt, a communist state on the path to ruin. Yugoslavia couldn't even feed its people and relied on the aid, remittances and kickbacks of foreigners on both sides of the Iron Curtain to maintain the semblance of order. In this proletariat idyll, people were voting with their feet.

Looking for a way out of this dead end, fifteen men and women living in Rijeka, mostly from Kali, chipped in and bought a fishing boat. The group found a captain and mate willing to take them under the cover of night across the sea to Italy.

The journey was fraught with danger. The old vessel wasn't up to it. The crew feared capture after the engine failed and abandoned the asylum-seekers. The boat drifted near enough to shore for Italian authorities to bring them into port.

Milenka didn't tell her parents about her escape in advance and never saw them again. She spent almost two years in four different refugee camps, helped by Catholic relief agencies in Italy, including the US National Catholic Welfare Conference. The Italian camps were crowded and those seeking sanctuary were malnourished and vulnerable, especially women.

The two friends, however, found a decent level of comfort due to the church. From photos on the eve of their departure for Australia, Milenka and Rajka appear healthy and hopeful. By the late 1950s, there was a deluge of young escapees out of Croatia to Italy and Austria. Some of these desperate people were repatriated and punished. Milenka and Rajka stuck together and eventually made contact with a Croatian Catholic priest in Sydney, who sponsored their passage to Australia as ‘New Settlers'. In March 1958 the record shows Milenka, a stateless, single, domestic servant, thirty-two (nudged down, she'd soon be thirty-four), boarded the
Aurelia
in Genoa for a five-week passage to Sydney. (Thirty years later Milenka would discover that a twenty-one-year-old Italian woman on that very voyage, Gilda Sernagiotto, was about to become my mother-in-law.)

Milenka was tall and strong, her brown hair naturally curly. She was shy in a strange land and worked as a housekeeper for doctors and lawyers in the mansions of the city's eastern suburbs.

‘We didn't come to Australia to be slaves,' Rajka told her friend, spurring them to strike out on their own.

Both found jobs in food factories. For a time, Milenka rented a room from a family that had several children, whom she cherished and who loved her. Milenka only socialised with other Croatians and went to Mass on Sundays in Surry Hills.

Through friends, she found her way to a lively share house in Newtown and fell in love. Aged thirty-five, she married the lean Croatian landlord, son of a woman from the Mustač family of coastal Privlaka, where Bare Lukin had raised the belltower.

Milenka was blessed with a total recall for details. The smuggling days would sit alongside war stories as treasured memories of adventure, flight and survival, told with relish and aplomb, through dramatic pauses and theatrical gestures. The roaming was over. Free from the threat of capture, with a new start in a rich country, the path ahead appeared to be straightforward – honest, legal labouring. The last contraband Milenka carried was me.

2

Love-struck

Ineska's eyes were a metallic blue, gleaming like a brand new party hat. For a time in my preschool years the blonde, attentive girl next door was mine. She was a little younger, small, but we were inseparable; technically, we lived under the same roof. My parents bought a house on the north side of Belmore in partnership with Teta Danica. The house, on the corner of Adelaide and Cecilia Streets, was divided into two separate two-bedroom residences with their own entrances. The yards were common, but because we lived in the front we played there more often. There was a laundry shared between families and an outside toilet if you were really busting.

The back flat was rented out, as was the house in Chalmers Street, which my parents were able to hold onto. This was capital accumulation, my parents' up-yours to communism in the steady 1960s.

Our empire was expanding, but not in the way Joso would have liked. He had his eye on buying a business, such as a corner shop or grocery store, perhaps even a newsagency. But Milenka did not want the seven-day drudgery that came with shop life for herself or her sons. I first heard having a shop had been on the cards just after I started school. For years I held on tight to a vision of a perfect life: an endless feast of lollies and ice-creams, as well as commandeering the cash register and being in charge.