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  Finally they let him go and left and as he was coming back into the house he sank to his knees and collapsed. He started crying and then we were both crying.

  I’ll never forget the lumps all over his face, and the blood. From that time on he was deaf in one ear.

  I was six. And that was my introduction to the police force.

  11. STEVE

  1968:

  TO THE WEST AND BACK

  ANNETTE:

  I was with this guy, Andy, for five and a half years until I walked away. My life had revolved around his friends, dances, and when we split up a lot of my friends moved on. I felt totally alone, and I was on the rebound.

  I knew Steve’s family before Steve came to Australia. I knew his brother and his mother, and that’s how I met Steve. He ended up living next to me when I was living with Andy. He didn’t speak English then and I could manage to get through in Croatian, which I had picked up.

  Then Steve went to Queensland to work on the sugar cane, and I went on a holiday to Sydney to visit some mutual friends of ours and stay with them. One day I walked out the front door only to run into Steve, who walked out the neighbour’s front door. We were looking at each other and we couldn’t believe it.

  So then we started to hang around together in a group and go to different places. And his mother had moved to Spotswood [in Melbourne] and my mother lived at Spotswood. It was amazing – our paths always crossed – and somehow we got together.

  It was my biggest mistake.

  Steve was likeable and charming, like Chris is, but the person underneath was totally different.

  We got engaged on my 21st and it was after that that I fell pregnant with Chris. That was the reason I got married, you know; it was the old-fashioned way. To be totally honest, I don’t think I was in love with Steve.

  Even when we were engaged he started to slap me around.

  Not so much at first but, for instance, we were driving across the Nullarbor to Fremantle and I was sitting in the back reading the map. We had another Croatian with us – there were three of us – and he was in the front next to Steve. Steve hit a pothole and went off at me, and then he hit a kangaroo that jumped in front of him. The kangaroo hopped away but there was hair and blood. Steve turned around and whacked me. The guy travelling with us asked why and Steve said, ‘She should have been watching.’ I was in the back seat.

  I just took off my engagement ring and threw it on the dashboard. I got hit because he hit a kangaroo. Yeah.

  But I had nowhere to go because we were in the middle of the Nullarbor, so I had to continue the trip. We ended up at his cousin’s place in Fremantle and I had no one. I didn’t know anyone: they were all his relatives, his cousins; I didn’t have a job. I was pregnant.

  There were a lot of contributing factors to why I married Steve, and it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

  He was always calling me the Croatian name: kurva, prostitute, and bitch, and this, that and the other. There was no respect, no nothing. I had no say, no rights.

  When Chris had not long been born Steve brought in two mates who I had to wash for by hand, their clothes, their sheets – no washing machine – and I had to make their sandwiches. One day when Chris was about six weeks old I had to go buy sausages and salami so Steve drove me to the delicatessen and gave me a $50 note. The woman didn’t have change so she went in the back. Steve was parked right out the front yelling at me, ‘Hurry up you bloody bitch!’ and tooting the horn and the more he shouted and tooted, the more Chris, as a frightened baby, screamed. ‘What’s keeping you, you bloody bitch!’ I told him I was waiting for change. ‘Wait till you get home,’ he said, and when we got home I got a severe belting. For waiting for change.

  One day Steve brought a dog home. I don’t know where he got it but it always went for me. I had no fear of animals, not even snakes, but this thing petrified me. I couldn’t go out the door without it going for me. One day it got into the kitchen and I had to get up on the table. I complained to Steve about it but he did nothing.

  My sister came over one day and went to the shop for me to get milk. The dog followed her and saw other dogs and took off with them. I got blamed for getting rid of the dog. I hadn’t even left the house. I said to Steve, ‘The dog took off with other dogs.’

  ‘You didn’t like the dog, you bloody bitch,’ he said, and he bashed me.

  His relative stayed with us and I hated him because he tried to rape me a few times when Steve went to soccer. He was an alcoholic, a real dirty no-hoper type and his family sent him to Australia to get rid of him and he ended up on our doorstep. He was always putting me down to Steve and putting Steve down to me. But when Steve wasn’t home he was always coming into my bedroom and trying all sorts of things and Steve didn’t take any action. I kept telling Steve, but his kin had more rights than I did.

  We’d had problems with him before. He’d had us kicked out of a house in Maribyrnong, and I didn’t want him there. But Steve snuck him into the garage. One night I’m at the kitchen washing dishes and I see his relative, carrying a suitcase, and Steve’s hiding him in the shed so I wouldn’t see him. I hit the roof but I had no say. I had to be quiet. Gradually he moved him into the house.

  When Chris was three and Barry about one, I was setting pork chops on the table for dinner and Chris reached out for one so Steve slapped him.

  I said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘They’re not my kids. I’m not feeding them.’ He was crazy.

  And his relative actually stood up for the kids. He said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and gave Chris the chop.

  Steve took him outside, punched him in the face and threw him out. Because he gave Chris the chop. He defied him.

  Trying to rape me was okay, though. There was so much of this stupidity, this insanity. Chris doesn’t know all this. I haven’t told Chris a lot of what my marriage was.

  Barry knows some of it but I don’t get too much into it. It upsets me to remember all of this. I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t see the point in telling the kids all the sordid details. It’s like I’m protecting them, and Chris will just think I’m a liar making it up because he wouldn’t see his father in the real light. It would be: ‘Oh, you’re making up stories.’ So I just keep a lot of it to myself.

  Steve broke my nose once. We were both smokers and he was in one of his funny moods. My mother came over with my sister, who was ten. She came by public transport. I was in the kitchen by the sink and I lit up a cigarette. He just slapped it out of my mouth. Yet we were both smokers; we always smoked. He just decided to hit me, and it started from that.

  I got pushed on the ground and then he was choking me and I was trying to release the pressure on my throat because I had been choked into unconsciousness twice before in Fremantle. Nearly died.

  So in order to release his grip on my throat I was pinching his face. You should have seen what his face looked like. I didn’t realise. All I was trying to do was release the pressure – I was choking.

  My mother was screaming hysterically, begging him to stop, my sister was crying, and then finally he let me go and hit me in the face. That’s when he broke my nose. Blood was spurting down my face. My mother was hysterical – this is a woman with heart trouble. Then he turned on my mother and was going to hit her and push her out the front door but my sister and I stood between them and I wouldn’t let him touch my mother.

  She left and I walked to the train station still bleeding. I was covered in blood; people looked at me, but I was past worrying about that and I went to see a girlfriend.

  There was no point in calling the police – which I had done in Fremantle – because back then the police weren’t that interested. In those days they didn’t involve themselves in domestic disputes. They do now and laws have changed, but then they would just turn up and thump them on the chest and say, ‘Look at how big you are; look how small she is. If you touch her again we’ll deal with you.’ It was just empty talk – that
was all it ever came to, so Steve had no fear of the police.

  I was a mess. I was so thin that I had to go into children’s clothing and I was always shaking, my nerves were so bad, and he used to imitate me and say, ‘Look at her!’ and laugh at me.

  But my kids don’t know all this, you see. I don’t tell them these things. They wouldn’t believe me anyway. It would be impossible for them to believe it. They wouldn’t want to know about the bashings and his affairs behind my back.

  When we were living in Fremantle, Steve got a job in Albany and he got a room with this Croatian idiot, an old man.

  I was 21, 22, and this old man had a big testicle hanging down – something went wrong with surgery. Anyway, he rented to Steve one bedroom and we shared the kitchen. In the meantime I had to dispose of everything in Fremantle, pack up everything and get a truck and bring all the furniture over. He left me with the whole caboodle. While I was doing all this in Fremantle, with a baby, Steve is playing around in Albany with this woman, Elizabeth. Finally I get to Albany, I come to this house; the bedroom has dark brown chocolate walls and the bath tub was stained because the guy used it as a toilet. He couldn’t be bothered going to the outhouse. I scrubbed it and scrubbed it and scrubbed it and scrubbed it, but anyway.

  Steve would go off to work early and I’d be sitting there feeding the baby or eating breakfast and this guy is talking about ejaculation and how good he is with sex and the women and how when he ejaculated he’d spurt it all over the place. I kept saying to him, ‘Don’t talk of things like that in front of me. I don’t like to listen to this.’ But he kept on, and every morning we had the sex talk.

  There was no lock on our bedroom door so while I’m still in bed he’d come in on some pretext. I complained and complained to Steve but it meant nothing. He was a Croatian; he was his mate. I was his wife, but I was nothing. So Steve didn’t take any action, didn’t even have a word to him about it. He thought it was funny, actually, and I lived there for nearly six months with this filthy old bastard. I dreaded going into the kitchen knowing he was there but there was no choice.

  One night when I was pregnant with Barry my sister came to visit me with about three of her girlfriends. We were in the kitchen and heard crying. Chris was only about one and a half and what this bastard did was slam his head into the brick fireplace. Chris must have touched something. He had an indentation, a dent, on his forehead. And then this bastard took my son and shoved him in the wood cabinet near the stove. And the father? Steve did nothing. He took absolutely no action against his son being assaulted. My sister witnessed all this and said, ‘That’s it, you’re getting out of here.’

  ‘Where am I going to go?’

  ‘You can come in with me.’

  That was it: I left. But that was all very well for my sister – she was going back to Fremantle. What about me, afterwards? Some old people on a strawberry farm took me in, parents of a friend. I had no money. When I was pregnant with Chris I did work in a factory making sausages but now I was totally dependent on Steve. When I left him I took the joint bank book and withdrew very small amounts. That’s how I survived; I had no pension.

  So we ended up on the strawberry farm and one day I was shopping in Albany when Steve came out of the pub and saw me. He said he was thinking of going back to Melbourne and he would take me back with him. I jumped at the chance. But then on the way he decided to dump me on the Nullarbor with Chris. I was so much in fear, so absolutely terrified, that we were going to die there. I did a lot of fast talking, I tell you what.

  I was so relieved when we got to Melbourne. I was very vulnerable in Fremantle and Albany – they were all his friends, all his relatives.

  I LEFT STEVE THE DAY HIS MOTHER BASHED ME

  I left him for good the day his mother bashed me.

  She was forever interfering in my marriage, feeding him lies, and she rang me up one day and started to abuse me. I said in Croatian, ‘Go to the shit house.’ It was the first time I ever fired back. So she came that afternoon with her boyfriend when Steve was there. Steve’s relative who tried to rape me was there too because Steve had brought him back again. The relative grabbed my hands in a firm grip and held them behind my back while Steve’s mother started slapping me. I couldn’t defend myself or even protect my face. The relative was saying, ‘Give her what I gave my wife.’ Her boyfriend was laughing and my husband was laughing. I was nothing.

  And Chris and Barry were there – little kids seeing their mother assaulted by their relatives as their father laughed.

  This was the final straw. I contacted a policeman that had been involved in some of the incidents and he organised for a friend with a truck to come down the next day when Steve had gone to the country, and take the TV and the fridge and whatever little else – clothing, the single mattress.

  Chris was three and a half when I left Steve. Barry was eighteen months.

  I still think Chris doesn’t face up to the whole picture – a bit of self-denial. If he reads what I have to say about Steve and what he did I don’t think he’ll believe it.

  I haven’t said much to the kids. I think: what’s the point of all this? It’s past; they don’t need to know. It’s over. I don’t dwell on it; I’m talking about it now but I don’t dwell on it. Some people can learn from the past and its lessons but most people don’t heed it.

  Funny thing, after I left Steve went around telling everybody I was a prostitute, that I stole everything – stories like you wouldn’t believe. I left the furniture behind, dinner sets, ornaments: everything but the fridge, the TV, and a single bed. I slept with two kids in that bed. I was often drenched with urine from the kids. It was hard. I left the lounge, the dishes, everything behind. I had no wardrobes, nothing, and ate off suitcases – that was my table.

  As soon as I left his mother moved in and she lasted three months with him. Three months she lasted with her son.

  It’s funny because many years later when I was living with my second husband in Williamstown, out of the blue Steve’s mother, Jacqueline, would ring me up begging me to go back to him. She didn’t like the other girlfriends and she said, ‘You were the best, you did gardening, you were clean and you cooked and you did the garden with two little kids.’ She called Steve’s other girlfriends benches and prostitutes – the same things she used to call me.

  I said, ‘Jackie, I’m married and there’s no way in hell I’m going back to that household.’

  I was with Steve from 1967 until nearly 1972.

  He found out where I was living and he kept coming round all the time. I was living with Hans and his [first] wife and my kids. It was a part of the house I was renting – like a bungalow attached to the house – and we were sharing a bathroom. I asked Hans to put a safety chain on the inside of the door and after all the effort Hans went to, Steve just came one day and smashed the whole door in. The frame hit my head. He’d say, ‘But you’re still my wife. You’re still my wife.’

  I’m still his wife sometimes and other times I’m a bloody bitch – as he told everybody – a prostitute, a thief who had stolen everything from him. There was one Croatian I ran into, someone who had been told all this crap, and I said, ‘Come to my house. Now, look at this. This is my table.’ And I showed him the suitcases. I showed him that I had no chairs. I showed him the single bed and said, ‘This is where I sleep with two kids. This is all I’ve got.’

  So I moved out of there and moved to Northcote. He didn’t know I was there but I felt alienated in a strange area. I’m used to the western suburbs, so I came back to Williamstown.

  Hans and his wife divorced and he got in touch and eventually we started dating.

  When I married Hans, Steve owed me a lot of money in child maintenance, thousands, and I wanted to change the lounge room into the kitchen and put a window in. So Steve actually did that for me but then Steve kept coming around. He was constantly there and then he started to bring the relative around, the one that had tried to rape me. I told him to get out
and when Steve started arguing with me I said, ‘Get him out now or I’ll call the police.’ I was remarried and for once Steve told him he’d better go.

  After that Steve used the excuse of coming to see the kids, to come around – all the time. He was always hitting on me. He’d grab me all the time and it would end up being a struggle because he wanted to kiss me and I’d end up with bruised wrists.

  Steve came around even though we had confrontations. When I was seven months pregnant with my child to Hans, Wayne, Steve tried to kick me in the stomach in front of my mother’s neighbour. He said, ‘I don’t want you having anybody’s kids but mine.’

  After Hans and I divorced and I was single again he came around all the time, even at seven o’clock in the morning. I’d say, ‘What are you doing here so early?’

  ‘I’ve come to see the kids.’

  Chris ran away from home and lived with him for three months. I took it to court, but because Chris was twelve he was allowed to decide who he wanted to live with. And in the court Steve, in front of everybody, approached my solicitor – some young solicitor – and asked if Barry was his [the solicitor’s] son. Weird. Steve thought he could see some similarities. The guy freaked out and said, ‘No, I’ve never been to Fremantle.’

  And in court, Chris chose his dad because his dad was spoiling him.

  That’s what hurt me with Chris: he always sided with his father. The father was adventurous and exciting and very much like Chris. The mother was the opposite: strict. That’s what hurt me the most when it was me that raised them. I sat up until two or three o’clock working my butt off doing extra embroidery to provide them with Christmas presents and things like that. The father provided nothing and he became the hero and I became the shit. That’s what hurt me.