Zagreb 16.9.24. Matica Iseljenika Hrvatska

Nina lecturing at the Matica headquarters on the life and work of Amelia Batistich. The exhibition ‘See What We Are Making For You” premiered at Matica, the Croatian Heritage Foundation. On the screen is the opening shot of the 1994 documentary “Dalmatian at Heart” in the New Zealand Immigrant Nation television series. In this documentary Nina was flown back to Croatia with her mother to explore her Croatian roots.

Lecture to Accompany the “See What We Are Making For You!” Amelia Batistich exhibition, written and edited by Dr Nina Nola, updated 31.8.25 

Amelia Batistich—who was she? Why should we know about her? What was her contribution to New Zealand culture? Her contribution to Croatian culture, and to world literature? And how far was her global reach? The “See What We Are Making For You” exhibition was made possible by the unique relationship Amelia allowed me to foster with her in the last decade of her life until her death in 2004, and the generosity of time and care and commitment of her son Anthony Batistich.

The exhibition came about when Anthony and I were discussing which of Amelia’s many, fascinating papers—including vital correspondence with leading literary figures and copious notes on her writing—were to be deposited in the University of Auckland Special Collections archive. We quickly realized what a treasure trove we had before us, and that we had a responsibility to make something of it, not just see the papers languish in a large, imposing and often impersonal tertiary institution. “Let’s stage an exhibition,” I remember suggesting, and then Dr Tuga Tarle invited me to Zagreb.

Each poster in the exhibition has a key theme announced by the central heading, focusing on one aspect of Amelia’s life journey through writing to becoming decorated by Queen Elizabeth 11 in 1997 for her services to the community through her writing, both nationally and internationally.

Let’s start with the tagline on the title poster, “See what we are making for you!” This cry, emphatic with its exclamation mark, represents the guiding principle of not only the majority of Amelia’s characters, but of the migrant endeavour itself. Half celebratory, half entreaty…when Amelia’s character in “A Dalmatian Woman” holds up her first born in the new land of New Zealand she makes this declaration as a justification of all the pain and hardship she and her husband endured leaving Dalmatia for the wild, largely uninhabited north of the North island of New Zealand. “See!” she cries. “You have to see,” is what she really means, or else the sacrifices and losses attendant to migration, in the great Croatian diaspora, would have all been for nothing.

Where did it all start? The first poster, “Beginnings”, shows Amelia’s origins in the village Zaostrog where both her parents were born. Her father Ivan Barbarich made good in New Zealand as a gum digger and drainage contractor and returned to his village and fell in love with Milka Matutinovich. Ivan was forced to leave Dalmatia as he had become a New Zealand citizen, and Milka followed him, to be married in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Auckland, where Dalmatian baptisms, christenings, confirmations and weddings were celebrated. This church was still significant over half a century later when I was growing up a Catholic Dalmatian in Auckland. The infographic depicts the arduous journey from Europe to New Zealand and perhaps more importantly the significance of the cultural distance Ivan and Milka experienced in their new home on the other side of the world.

Experiences were rich and rewarding for the young Amelia, born in 1915 two years after her parents’ marriage. She was privileged to witness the unique mix that was the town of Dargaville of her childhood from her birth until 1926— a bustling town built on the hard work of all three of its major populations: the British New Zealanders, the local indigenous Māori, and the Dalmatians.

Amelia described her childhood as inhabiting a three-way world, and what better vantage point than her family’s boarding house, run by her very capable mother, Milka. Aurega House was built by the Hillary family, of Sir Edmund Hillary fame. Most of the boarders were Dalmatian men who passed through on the way to Auckland to collect their proxy brides off the ship—the stranger they had married on the strength of a photograph—and stayed a few nights before taking their shocked brides out to the barren gum digging camps with their sack huts and mud floors. Amelia was flower girl at many weddings, watching with bewilderment the confusion of emotions the brides struggled to contain.

Emotions ran deep with Amelia, and on the next poster you can see several of the prompts for Amelia’s later writing: “Emotions” shows a baby Amelia already keenly observing the activity around her. The busy main street of Dargaville, the port where the steamers would arrive with the proxy brides from “the old country”, the austere Catholic church and boarding school where Amelia was sent when she was naughty, all crowded her young mind. And Amelia was often naughty! And sensitive. And inquisitive.

Despite boarding school, Amelia never recalled her childhood without fondness, referring back to the Great Northern Wairoa River as symbolically significant. “There is always a river running in some corner of my mind. Some place where I never grew up, never got old” she wrote in her memoir.

The Barbarich family moved from Dargaville to Auckland when Amelia was aged 11, and here Amelia attended convent school, and while feeling like an outsider, still managed to excel academically, and become Dux of her year. This is when Amelia started dreaming about becoming an author, of making people cry. Her status as a foreigner, both coming from a Dalmatian family, and a family that moved to the big city of Auckland from the northern districts, gave Amelia a window into internal migrations, a view of how it felt to not fit in, not quite belong. Attracted to the life of a nun, Amelia completed her novitiate year but was too enamoured of the thought of being a writer to take the veil.

A teenager straight out of convent life, Amelia found herself maturing into a young woman immersed once more in, and once again thrilled with, the Dalmatian world of her childhood, now in the family quarry in Mt Wellington, Auckland. The Bluestone Quarries was significant in east Auckland both as the employer of many Dalmatian men, largely from Korčula, encouraging the chain migration common to the Dalmatian New Zealand story, and as the provider of metal and manpower for many of the city’s early construction projects and civil works. Amelia was attracted to the foreman of her father’s quarry—her life was about to change. Married at 20, she was raising three children when stories demanded attention in her imagination.

 Amelia’s transition from a small-town country girl—from Dargaville to Auckland—was mirrored in the shift captured in the next poster, “Transitions” from a wife and mother to a wife and mother who wrote. Nothing was beyond Amelia, and she loved to tell everyone that her first earnings as a writer were for a poem she wrote in New Zealand “Kiwi” vernacular about a famous racehorse which tragically fell. The poem was published in the very “low brow” racing weekly Best Bets. But it was writing, and Amelia was thrilled. Her first short story, “Street Corner”, was published in 1948, and from that moment she was hooked on being an author.

Celebrated women’s lingerie manufacturer Berlei was also thrilled that Amelia gave the company years of her life while a young mother and aspiring writer to crafting the superlative language endemic to advertising: “Look lively—step lively,” Amelia wrote; “No figure is too large, or too small, to look lovelier in perfect-fitting Berlei.” She also turned her children’s lives into fiction, writing about Anthony’s passion for the game of marbles. Soon, prizes and awards came her way, but they came after hard work and many, many hours on an old Olivetti typewriter. “Good Dalmatian wives just didn’t go to adult education classes” Amelia liked to quip; this Dalmatian wife and mother hurried cooking the evening meal so that she could hang up her apron and run out the door to catch the tram to writing class in the city, leaving husband Tony to put the three children to bed. There were several ruined dinners in the process as Amelia distractedly typed while pots burned. She just had to finish her latest story.

In the “Storytelling” poster the subtitle “writing Dalmatians into literature” is exactly what Amelia achieved; the poster features Amelia’s two collections of short stories. The groundbreaking An Olive Tree in Dalmatia was first published in 1963 and changed the course of literature in New Zealand. Here are Amelia’s own words about this powerful little book: “I remember saying to myself when I wrote that first collection: I must get Dalmatia on the cover of my book. I wanted the word DALMATIA written into the New Zealand story. I wanted to say HERE WE CAME AND HERE WE STAY.” Note the capital letters I’m emphasizing are Amelia’s.

 A photo of Amelia with her copies of An Olive Tree shows the author beyond pleased with the book which the publisher’s editor claimed was written in a new voice, a voice not yet heard in New Zealand literature, and a voice worth listening to. It made Dalmatian New Zealanders heard for the first time in a work of fiction. The tension between belonging and not feeling at home, between carving out a niche in New Zealand society and never really being accepted is a central thread of the Dalmatian stories. It was reading this modest little book that changed the course of my own life: Amelia’s characters leapt out at me and seemed to say—for the first time, and after I’d completed a degree in Literature in English—“here you are. This is you and your people. You are a Dalmatian New Zealander.” This lightning moment made me enrol in a master’s programme and subsequently a doctoral degree. I just had to find out how Amelia’s writing had achieved this feat. And I had to honour Amelia: for the first time in my life, because of what Amelia wrote, and how she wrote it, I felt I knew who I was.

 What is little known in New Zealand publishing—nor by the reading public—is that Amelia’s editor insisted that only stories featuring Dalmatian characters be included in the collection, and that stories Amelia proposed featuring Māori and other protagonists be excluded. In this way Amelia’s reputation as the chronicler of Dalmatian migrant experience rather than universal human experience was established.

 While “An Olive Tree in Dalmatia”, reprinted in 1980, features some of Amelia’s best-loved stories, the two novels that followed challenged her readers. Mountains was a repeated theme, a lodestone in each novel, and in the poster “Mountains” it is obvious that Amelia is making a fictional transition from a mountain far away in Dalmatia to one much closer to home.

The publishing history of Amelia’s novels is unusual: first published in 1981 with great foresight by Matica, Pjevaj Vilo u Planini was the translation of the chronological unpublished first novel Sing Vila in the Mountain. Following on from the very successful 1963 publication of An Olive Tree, and its reprint in 1980, Amelia submitted the manuscript of Sing Vila as an autobiography looking back to her childhood years in Dargaville, of being surrounded by Dalmatian migrants and proxy brides, of the story telling and pjesme with which Milka, Amelia’s mother, and the boarders, filled the boarding house. The trouble was that the piecemeal structure of the novel, mimicking the fragmented identities of the Dalmatians, confronted the publisher’s readers with a totally new way of presenting a story about New Zealand. What they did agree on, however, was that a new type of New Zealander was being explored.

It is important to remember that up until Amelia started publishing her short fiction there were no voices from outside the mainstream: white, middle-class males dominated the literature. If we look at the covers of Amelia’s two novels in English, the vila, the fairy woman, depicted on the cover of the earlier novel set in Dargaville clearly becomes more flesh and blood in the later novel. Stella Barich the child confused about who she is and how her family fit in becomes Ketty Parentich the young woman embarrassed by her effusive family as she struggles to fit into a genteel, still very British, suburb of Auckland city. Biokovo becomes One Tree Hill, an important landmark in Auckland, and of personal significance to Amelia: she lived all her adult life where she could see One Tree Hill, regularly walking among its olive’s trees depicted in the title poster—it gave her a sense of place.

A summary of Amelia’s life’s work in the poster “Oeuvre” depicts the two books published toward the end of her life, the 2001 memoir Never Lost for Words (a title which describes Amelia perfectly) and A Better Life: The Diary of Ivana Ivanovich published two years later when the author was 88. This last book was written as part of a series for older children in fictional diary form covering important social, cultural and historical moments in New Zealand history; Amelia’s story intersects all three, exploring her Dalmatian girl’s experience of boarding school, her family’s migration, and the 1925 polio epidemic. It is based very closely on Amelia’s childhood in Aurega House.

Perhaps the most significant of all Amelia’s achievements—greater even then the repeated readings of her stories on international radio including the BBC and Canadian Broadcasting, spanning more than half a century—was her earlier writing commissioned by the New Zealand Department of Education. The covers of four of Amelia’s single-story books for children featuring Dalmatian, Indian, Greek and Māori identity in New Zealand depict the exploration of these identities. The most significant, it could be argued, is the last: before Amelia wrote about Māori, no one else had done so. In being given commissions by the government’s School Publications to explore childhood in New Zealand through the lens of other ethnic minorities, and Māori, Amelia was giving a voice to the silenced other in a predominantly British New Zealand. Today, Māori writers and scholars look back at Amelia’s stories on Māori culture as sensitively written and well-informed. Amelia knew what it meant to be marginalized, while being proud to be who she was. She infused all her fiction on ethnic minorities with this sensitivity. Patricia Grace, the leading Māori writer today, warmly wrote to me saying that when she first read Amelia’s fiction she thought “here is a different voice writing something different” and was encouraged to try to write about Māori herself. And the rest is history: Grace is a revered grandmother of our country’s literature today, a ‘kaumatua’ in te reo, her fiction an example to all Māori writers—to all writers, thanks to Amelia.

 Amelia’s work achieving global impact beyond her publications, as detailed in the poster “Outreach”, has occurred in several ways: through film, through translation and adaptation, and through engagement with students. In 1994 Amelia became a film star, featuring both in the New Zealand Film Commission documentary New Zealand Immigrant Nation: Dalmatian at Heart, and in another on famous New Zealand women, Convent Girls, which explored the influence of a Catholic education. It was a big year, and it left Amelia exhausted. She was also distressed by the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the homeland with which she identified. I struggled to enthuse Amelia to agree to a film adaptation of her haunting story “The Road Back”, incidentally my favourite of all her work. In this story, the Dalmatian migrant woman searches for the road back to Dalmatia in the trackless bush of the isolated north of New Zealand.

 In a still from the beautifully-realized film for which Amelia resisted giving approval—“I just can’t see how that story can be put on film” she worried aloud—Vinka imagines womenfrom her village back home appearing in the looking glass she holds up for company. “I want to go with you!” she entreats, but the women just turn back and ignore her, cutting her off and leaving her to her lonely life as a barren gum digger’s wife. As cultural and script consultant, and conduit between a despondent Amelia and a passionate and dedicated film crew, I struggled to whip up some enthusiasm from Amelia for the project. When it came to the screening, however, she was moved to tears. It is as haunting a film as the story is uncomfortable and left deliberately unresolved, and I am very proud to have been part of the production, even getting my mother to be the lead villager, and my baby son a bemused extra.

Belonging is what every migrant aspires to, and in the poster “Belonging” Amelia’s critical reception is detailed, her place in the New Zealand literary and cultural scene outlined, a belonging that she so deservedly earned, and claimed. Honorary president of the country’s Society of Authors, celebrated guest spots in literary festivals (there’s an image of Amelia and I on stage together with me conducting a panel discussion), and features which I wrote for the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature all add up to a significant presence. The phrase “simple warm and lively stories”, however, confused critics who failed to read the intricate and subtle exploration into identity that can be charted throughout Amelia’s fiction. Penned by Professor Peter Simpson at the University of Auckland where I was awarded my doctorate in 2000 on Amelia’s contribution to New Zealand literature, this throwaway comment—“simple warm and lively”— needed to be read as a coda to deep analysis revealing an adept writer honing her craft on the subject of not only the Croatian diaspora, but migration as a whole and the translations of self that accompany it.

 My critical appraisal of Amelia’s life work as astonishingly insightful and avant garde is borne out by these two well-deserved accolades: her Queen’s service medal, and an entry in the 2023 New Zealand Penguin anthology. “50 stories for 50 years in Aotearoa” (Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand) had to include a story by Amelia, and I was privileged to be asked to write the biographical note accompanying it.

There are so many papers that Anthony Batistich and I have pored over, but we still both jumped with delight when we came across this note about Amelia’s writing, a draft which is priceless. It’s an acknowledgement of her Croatian heritage, and a challenge to New Zealand readers to continue the story telling. “Asked why he climbed the mountain, Sir Edmund Hillary replied: ‘Because it was there.’ I could say the same of my Dalmatian stories; I was there. I saw it all happening, the noveli, the newcomers adjusting to the strange land, the lonely women on the farms wondering sometimes if God himself knew this land…” and it ends “….All our ancestors knew, treasured and sang the pjesme, the songs my mother sang for me.  All our Dalmatian instinct is to tell a good story, price. We love our stories. I hope the stories I have written will enter into and remain in our traditional heritage. I, you who read this now (and I hope in generations to come) will be merged into the New Zealanders of the future. I am glad I wrote the stories. You who come after me, read them and write your own.”

The final two posters of the “See What we are Making for You” exhibition give background information on the migrations of Dalmatians to New Zealand through successive waves, from the South Island in search of gold from the mid-1880s, through to the far North in the 1990s for “poor man’s gold” as kauri gum was called. They also illustrate the livelihoods the migrants pursued, from the early gold and gum digging to wine making and stone masonry, fishing to construction. The descendants of these original migrants, myself included, can look around today and note that there is not much in New Zealand, particularly Auckland, which was not created in part by the hard labour, ingenuity and commitment of the hardworking individuals of the Croatian diaspora.