Whole Wild World: A Memoir

By Tom Dusevic

In this exuberant and compelling memoir of family and childhood, readers will be swept away by Tom Dusevic's verve, warmth and honesty. Suburban Sydney in the 1970s is an adventure playground, especially for a busybody, free-range kid with energy, big appetites and ungodly urges. In such open space, backyards are arenas for daydreaming and free play, scars are marks of wisdom and school is an obstacle course between pleasure and pain. And so is home, as the author tries to make sense of his parents' history and identity, known but unknowable, as post-war refugees from Croatia. He longs to be liberated from the family's quirks and the past and finds his escape in quiet moments of awe and simplicity. This is a sensory tale of a glorious time to grow up in Australia by a visceral writer whose epiphanies are as startling as they are hilarious. From rowdy street protests and footy crowds, to the serenity of the Roselands Raindrop Fountain and storm-water canals, to the fevered set of a TV quiz show and the disco floor, Dusevic launches himself into the whole wild world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jun 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781742242385

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Preface

Even before my fourth birthday I’d had enough of life under a dictatorship. Denied a lolly by Tata, my father, I demanded to know why.

‘Zašto?’ I asked in Croatian, our mother tongue. Talking him round would be almost impossible, but I would try. Besides, I didn’t see what it had to do with my father, lollies being part of my special bond with Mama.

Lying on the couch, Mr Chesty Bond in a white singlet, bit of grey around the temples, keeps reading the newspaper. He does this after lunch every day, before snoring into a pre-shift nap. I shake his skinny leg, punch him in the shoulder, ruffle the Sydney Sun he is immersed in.

‘Zašto?’ I pound and plead like a dissident.

He folds the paper looks me straight in the face.

‘Zašto? Why? Perché? Warum? Zakaj?’ He mocks me in five languages, but to my ears he’s simply conjured up from nothing a cruel nursery rhyme. Tata worked his shtick for decades; like a nightclub entertainer and his catchphrase, he savoured the rising inflection of those last six syllables.

That’s it. Too far, mate.

I dig out one of my mother’s blue, fine-mesh nylon shopping bags and begin filling it with essentials. Even at this age I know where she stashes stuff. Plastic bowl. Spoon. Cup. Pyjamas. Blanket. One-eyed teddy.

This could be a long trip. It had to look like one. I’m only three, improvising.

‘Ja idem.’ I’m going, I say, poised at the front door. ‘I’m going. I’m going.’

‘Where are you going?’ asks Mama, who’s come from the kitchen.

‘Away from here. Far away. I’m not telling.’

‘But how will you live?’

‘I’ll get a job and have some money.’

‘Okay.’

Why aren’t they trying to stop me?

‘I really am going,’ I declare, shopping bag in hand, teddy under one arm, straining to reach the twist lock on the door with the other, despite being tall for my age. I shuffle down the stairs to the front gate, as slow an exit as there’s ever been. I take short strides in the direction of the railway line, not knowing my next move. I look back, expecting them to stop me. I’m at the next house by the time Tata appears at the front door.

He’s going to beg me to stay. My relief instantly morphs into the wild idea that a whole bag of lollies will be my prize.

‘Watch out for the doggy on the corner, I saw him outside this morning when I went to the shops.’

Doggy. Big. Bites. Loose. Was that a bark?

I bolt home, face first into my mother’s soft apron, inconsol- able in defeat. I feel my father’s cackle like a face slap, see his barrel chest pumping like a piston, bottom teeth a regiment of gaunt yellow soldiers. He’ll remind me of this episode for years. Ja idem. Ja idem. But I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

I was trapped, twelve years a Slav.

This is the story of people itching to leave but having to stay. It’s mostly about a boy from a migrant family shaped by curiosities and fears during the 1960s and 1970s. Told slant and skewed, true, save for the protective coatings and sifting of memory. Here are dispatches from a busybody edging away from a stifling home life towards something I sensed had to be a better fit.

While scanning the frontier, I stumbled over knowledge without stopping to take it with me; I missed the patterns because I was lost in the details.

Fact-gatherer. Slow learner. Prisoner of sensitivities.

My parents, unsettled in their skin, were pulled in other ways. A decade too old for a fresh start, displaced and unsure of the ways of their new homeland, haunted by flickers of the troubled old one. Its glories, which flared brightly for the exiles, were alien to me. We were odd-shaped space debris on different orbits.

I am an Australian, Sydney born. Sydney, that pleasurable city of escapes. This is the start of my flight: freedom via parental neglect, joy in loose play, security in friends, dread and wonder stoked by mass entertainment. It was a time to improvise and to keep asking why; to push back the past and daydream about what I might find under a dappled sky that cradled the whole wild world.

1

Escapees

I broke free on a lazy Sunday to mixed notices. My father Joso welcomed a second son, hoping one boy would become a priest, the other a soldier. Although Milenka was a mum again, six months shy of forty, it was unlikely she’d be able to have a longed-for daughter.

Two-year-old livewire Šime sized up a likely deficit in attention against the bonus of a playmate – a hard-fought draw. Outside the bosom of the family there was a pall of discontent. Due to the fresh delivery at Canterbury Hospital, the weekly beer and bocce after Mass in our backyard was cancelled. By January 1964, our cast was complete. The postwar boom, baby, was over.

But the Cold War was in full swing, even in Sydney. Milenka had her heart set on naming me Boris, after a beloved nephew of her own age who had died young. My father shot down that small wish not long after I was launched. Having escaped the communists in Yugoslavia, Joso wasn’t going to share his home with even a tiny reminder of the USSR.

‘Boris is a Slavic name,’ he declared. ‘I believe we can do much better than that.’

A more fitting name was Tomislav, after the first king of Hrvatska, land of the Croats. Tata tended to get his way. Šime had been the name of his late older brother. Besides, as Tata would say in his tender moments, this name was pure romance: ‘Tom is love’. Or perhaps even a lion, he’d tease, playing literal with the Croatian lav.

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 Šime, 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 Šime (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 Dushevich, 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.

Šime 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. Šime 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 Šime 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 Šime. 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 Šime. One morning, when he was three, Šime 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, Šime 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.

Šime 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.

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