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Ivan Antulich was born in Croatia in 1935, just as Europe was about to plunge into a catastrophic war. He survived, but at a cost that would scar him for the rest of his life. Like many others, he sought peace and prosperity for himself and his family by migrating, but also like many others he found his adopted home, Australia, as much a place of disappointment as a sanctuary. He returned home to Croatia only to find that the place he remembered had changed in his absence and left him behind. Highly Commended in the IP Picks Awards for Best Creative Non-fiction, this is an intimate portrait of an individual and a family that recreates the experience of so many people who grapple with a new culture and language, never quite escaping their urge to return to “where they belong.”
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ISBN 9781876819750 |
RRP: AUS$30 |
Biography |
PB 224pp |
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Reviews |
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Coral Petkovich
Coral began writing her book while her children were small. In the evening after dinner she would ask her husband for details of his life, especially his early childhood. Gradually she composed a comprehensive biography which she later organised into a literary format.
She has had several stories published and another was highly commended in a competition.
Sample
Ivan was depressed for days afterwards. All those people, at first glance quite normal but actually cold and dead, worried him more than the others, the featureless bodies mangled out of recognition which he had never approached close enough to see properly. Nightmares showed him again and again the faces he tried so hard to forget, except that in his dreams the faces came alive, with staring eyes and open mouths and arms which clutched at him when he tried to run, and the rats which he had seen bloody and startled became enormous with teeth big and sharp and biting—it was a long time before he could sleep again without waking up screaming.
Violence and death were part of their lives, the generation of children losing their childhood to the war. Even in their games, they could not get away from it. Their favourite game was patterned on the war itself, their own private war. It was an intermittent affair, fought by a gang from one district against another, never ending, always starting again after every victory, every defeat. Their weapons were lethal, even to guns with live ammunition, and always there was a good supply of bricks and sticks, catapults and bows and arrows and stones of all shapes and sizes. They built castles from the ruins of houses demolished by bombs, and defended them against all attackers. Sometimes they held up traffic and blocked the street to pedestrians until police or other officials came to disperse them. These fierce games resulted in injury or even occasionally, death to some of those involved, but the risk was not so great as the possibility of dying in bed in an air raid.
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This is the story of Ivan Antulich, a Croatian man born in 1935, whose childhood was marked by the onslaught of war. ‘He had seen death many times in his short life and every time he was afraid’, Coral Petkovich writes, after describing his seeing a group of people in an air raid bunker, all of them dead. The destruction of his world shocked him: ‘everywhere ruins, rubbish, desolation, as though no one lived there any more, no one cared. They were all caught up in the fight for survival, the eternal search for food, often for shelter’. Air raid sirens were constant, so that ‘Ivan had lost count of the number of times they had rushed for safety in the middle of the night’.
Petkovich describes one terrifying night of sudden bombing with no warning:
The loud roar of the planes, the whine of falling bombs, that terrible moment when it seemed the nearest one would fall right on top of them; then the explosion and sounds of destruction, breaking, snapping, collapsing. It went on and on, Ivan screaming hysterically...
The author of this fictionalised biography writes well, with clarity and simplicity. It is her late husband she is describing, but Coral Petkovich takes the position of omniscient narrator, writing a novelisation of Ivan’s life based on stories he told to her, and ‘general family knowledge’. In the foreword, she tells the reader that she reconstructed surrounding detail, and changed the names. The childhood of Ivan is the most interesting because, as suggested by the quotations above, it gives the reader an understanding of the trauma that survivors of the war experienced. Ivan lived with fear and death all around. He lost friends and realises that anyone could be killed at any time. His parents were sometimes physically violent towards the children, and each other, and Petkovich shows Ivan growing gradually distant from them because of this.
The telling of his adult life is not as compelling as that of his childhood, as there seems to be little development in his inner self. Indeed, Petkovich notes late in the book that Ivan never liked being introspective. Was it because of his traumatic early experiences that he rarely formed deeper friendships, knowing and being admired by many people, but not having many close friends? His wife notes that ‘[a]nyone disagreeing with him was just being difficult, or worse, was showing they were against him personally and was being disloyal’. Very tellingly, and sadly, he also believed that if you think ‘the worst of someone...you don’t run the risk of being disappointed’. He tried to escape from Croatia more than once as a young man in the late 1950s. On the second attempt, with adventure, he finally reached Australia. This is where he met and married Clair (Petkovich), began a family, and started establishing clubs and cafes, moving on when he became bored and found another venture more interesting. They moved between Australia and Croatia, but Ivan was restless and unsatisfied and seemingly disappointed with others and with his situation; there was always someone to ‘take the edge off his pleasure’.
Ivan was a patriarchal, controlling man. Life seemed to be centred around his own needs and desires, with everyone else coming second, even when it came to caring for his family. He cared for them his way, without asking what choices they might have made, and expected them to be grateful for what he did for them. Further sadness lay in his inability to understand why they were not grateful, and why he should not try to control other peoples’ lives. He did not understand why Clair would not want to go back to work after having a baby, or that she might have needed help with housework, or felt homesick for Australia and her parents. He believed that women in Australia ‘had too many rights’. Indeed, the book ends with ‘he died not really understanding himself or those around him’. And this lack of insight is partly the reason that, despite the fact Ivan had energy, ambition, zest for life, and worked hard, my interest in him waned as the story progressed. Without that inner life coming to the fore, without more psychological depth, he comes across as self-centred, bullying, and insufferably sexist. The author hints at these problems, but she needs to have explored them more deeply to bring out the special character of Ivan that drove her to write this book.
- Sue Bond, Compulsive Reader
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