Amelia Batistich: Never lost for words

"A mosaic" is how Batistich describes her book, which is both memoir and creative scrapbook. In her writing, she has been a spokeswoman for cultural understanding, chronicling the experience of non-British immigrants to New Zealand, such as her own Dalmatian family, and the evolution of their new cultural identities.

In these pages, one feels her determination to write, to express herself at a time (she was born in 1914) when it wasn't so easy for women to do so.

Sitting at her dining-room table, exhausting no fewer than six Olivetti typewriters, she pounded out a name for herself with stories that were published, thrillingly, in the Listener and, most especially, in the School Journal, as well as three books, including An Olive Tree in Dalmatia.

This memoir, which incorporates and contextualises several of her published and unpublished stories, is itself a piece in the bigger mosaic of our multicultural identity.

AUP

$29.95