In “Love at first write: Lifelong love stories stretching from Croatia to Australia”, originally written for SBS Croatian, Jasna Novak Milic tells a warm and touching story about two young Croatian women who met by chance in Zagreb, at the very beginning of their long journey to faraway Australia and whose love and life stories intertwined, resulting in two long marriages and one 60-year long friendship.
Award nominations:
Australian Migration and Settlement Awards 2019
Walkey Awards 2019
NSW Multicultural Media Awards 2019
While Marija, in her early 20’s, was on her way to reunite with her husband, whom she married via proxy on a tiny Croatian island, and whom she had not seen for five years, Mara, a 29-year old single, was on a quest for a better life and possibly a future husband.
Entertaining and movie-like on its surface, this story describes an era which many Australians, who themselves migrated to Australia between the ’50s and ’70s of last century, or whose parents or grandparents did, can relate. In a somewhat poetic way this story provides a snapshot of last century’s migration to Australia that includes long, often lonely journeys into the unknown, journeys that change lives, sometimes for worse, often, like in the case of these two women, for a more hopeful and positive future.
But it is more than just a story about a life-long friendship and love. This is a story of poverty in the post-war Europe, of political and/or economical exile, of hardships that awaited young migrants settling in Australia. It is a glimpse into the lives of all those young men who dreamed of their homelands while working hard to provide for themselves and for their families overseas, young men who understood how important it was to maintain their faith, their language and their culture as part of their identity, while settling into their new home country. It is also a story of an era when a lack of suitable brides in Australia meant marrying someone unknown from back home, often via proxy, was not unusual.
“Love at first write” is above all a true story of hope that brought so many young men and women to a new country, gave them peace, freedom, new friends and eternal love: for their spouses, their families and their two homelands.