Words flow from river to mountain

Youn know you have discovered a gifted writer when the skin at the back of your neck starts to prickle. And that is what happens when you read an Amelia Batistich story.

Listen to this clip from her autobiography, so pertinent in this age of blurred frontiers: "I knew who I was, what I was: a New Zealander going home. Yugoslavia sloughed me off like a skin. Not forgotten - never would be - but not my place, not my children's. Destiny had placed us at other ends of the world and we had taken root in this earth like those Italian olive trees in Cornwall Park."

Batistich has had plenty of time to get her roots down. Now 86, she was born in Dargaville in 1915. Her father, Jack Barbaric, left the island of Korcula as a teenager in the 1890s to seek his fortune on the Northland gum fields. Then, presumably having made enough to afford the trip, returned to Korcula to find a wife.

Batistich's description of the loneliness of her mother's life in the gumfields, in her story The Road Back is riveting. "There was a piece of looking glass above the wash basin. The woman liked to look into it, not for any satisfaction she had in seeing her own face mirrored there, but for the company it gave. Sometimes she talked to the glass just to see her own words come mouthing back. In the silence of her days her own voice echoed like a stranger's ... When he had disappeared over the hump of the hills she was left for the day to be filled in, somehow. In the beginning she had asked to go with him sometimes; she would just sit and watch. 'No place for a woman,' he answered roughly. 'Only men there'."

The little girl who was born 15 years into the 20th century, on the edge of those Dargaville gumfields, grew up to have a fascinating life. Always there was the talent with words, variously used to sell Berlei bras and corsets in the 60s, later to help in her work as assistant librarian at the Auckland Teachers' College in Epsom and to write stories for school journals and special "ethnic minority" editions of school bulletins, to chronicle her rich life as she raised three children, nursed a husband ground down too early by Parkinson's, meaning his wife took to paid employment in her late 40s.

Batistich's particular talent is for telling a simple story with tension that keeps you turning the pages - describing people and events with a poignancy that is tender yet tough at the same time. There is a smile there, often the stories bring you to tears with their abiding love for Auckland and New Zealand.

"If 70 years of Auckland doesn't make me an Aucklander I don't know what does. My life began by a Maori river and it will end in the shadow of a Maori mountain, Maungakiekie. But to Aucklanders it is One Tree Hill and nothing can take that name away from us. One Tree Hill is my familiar; I have lived in its shadow nearly all my life, known its joys and sorrows and all that lies in between. When, in the morning, I open the front door of my house it is there waiting for me. I talk to my mountain, One Tree Hill talks back to me."

As she says, "I've lived with that view for 75 years. I'm still mourning for that tree." Carroll du Chateau

* A new 10-part reading of Amelia Batistich's autobiography, Never Lost for Words, adapted by Eva Radich and starring Jean Betts, Dorothy McKegg, Nick Blake and Mathew Wilson, starts on Kim Hill's programme on Monday, November 5 at 10.20 am.