FROM DISTANT VILLAGES: THE LIVES AND TIMES OF CROATIAN SETTLERS IN NEW ZEALAND, 1858-1958
By Stephen A Jelicich
KEY POINTS:
When I was growing up, I was unaware there was a land called Croatia, though I did know we often dealt with people with unusual names who were called "Dallies".
Every so often, my Dad would head out to Kumeu to fill a couple of flagons with Mate Brajkovich's wine. If we went north, we'd usually stay a night or two on Boris Jurlina's farm near Doubtless Bay. On special occasions the place to go for a celebratory meal was Tony Posa's Royal Cafe in Devonport.
These Dallies were so much a part of the scene that it never occurred to me to wonder where they came from.
Of course, today we all know about Croatia, initially because of the horrors which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia and more recently because of its emergence as a travel destination.
But the collective story of New Zealand's Croatian settlers, and the important part they played in the development of the country, has remained largely untold until now.
Stephen A. Jelicich, who was born in the part of Croatia known as Dalmatia and came to New Zealand with his family in 1923 when he was 4, has devoted much of his life to collecting the stories of all the others who made the same journey in search of freedom and prosperity.
Although there are some chapters seeking to provide an overview of Croatian immigration, this book mainly consists of the individual tales of those who came here.
It was often a hard life, as a verse from gumfields poet Ante Kosovich indicates:
Ah, Dalmatia, I give you news of your sons,
How this wild, hard country beats them down
In the lonely hell of gumfields.
But despite that, few of the immigrants returned to Dalmatia and their determination and hard work eventually did create prosperity as they stayed to farm, produce wine, develop orchards, build commercial fishing fleets, run boarding houses and otherwise make new lives for their families.
From Distant Villages is an idiosyncratic, even amateurish, work, lacking coherence or organisation, but in many ways that is the source of its charm.
Turning its pages produces a parade of wonderful anecdotes, of life in the gumfields, breaking in land, planting trees and vines, arguing over the politics of the homeland, building churches, struggling against wartime xenophobia, starting sports clubs and creating communities, often told through the letters or memoirs of the pioneers and illustrated with marvellous snaps from their family albums.
Taken together, these stories do effectively create a picture of the forces which drove so many Dallies to leave home, the struggles which faced them on arrival and the efforts which brought success to most.
Jelicich tells the story of Mijo Brajkovich, who arrived in New Zealand in 1907 to work in the gumfields and in 1944 acquired a rundown block of land in Kumeu where he planted grapes, creating the winery where my father bought his sherry, today the widely respected Kumeu River Wines.
The book has the story, too, of the Jurlinas, a family whose members arrived in the Far North from 1896 to go gumdigging, opened a general store and gumtrading operation, and gradually acquired the land where we used to go on holiday.
There isn't an account of the Posa family, whose cafe was at one time the only eatery on the North Shore which opened at night (hard to believe these days), but the book does tell of many others who used the ancient skills developed over centuries of living on the shores of the Adriatic to earn a living catching, selling and serving fish.
Jelicich says, in his conclusion, that his aim in telling such stories was to make "a personal journey into the history of Croatians in New Zealand ... [to] capture the spirit of those men and women who made the long journey here and plant their families safely and securely within the wider New Zealand community." In that he has certainly succeeded.
