Ana Dean - Waiting for Danica: My Sister, My Story

Waiting for Danica: My Sister, My Story

Ana Dean

Published by Classic Author and Publishing Services Pty Ltd

Imprint: Jo Jo Publishing

First published 2015

JoJo Publishing

'Yarra's Edge'

2203/80 Lorimer Street

Docklands VIC 3008

Australia

Email:

Copyright 2014 Ana Dean

All rights reserved. No part of this printed or video publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

The information, views, opinions and visuals expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the publisher. The publisher disclaims any liabilities or responsibilities whatsoever for any damages, libel or liabilities arising directly or indirectly from the contents of this publication.

JoJo Publishing

Editor: Riima Daher

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Dean, Ana, author.

Title: Waiting for Danica : my sister, my story / Ana Dean ;

designer, Luke Harris.

ISBN: 9780994256478 (eBook)

Subjects: Kadi, Danica.

Runaway teenagers--Victoria--North Altona.

Children--Family relationships--Victoria--North Altona.

Street youth--Victoria--Melbourne--Social aspects.

Suburban gangs--Victoria--Melbourne.

Croatian Australians--Victoria--Melbourne.

Other Authors/Contributors: Harris, Luke, book designer.

Dewey Number: 362.7409945

Digital edition distributed by

Port Campbell Press

www.portcampbellpress.com.au

eBook Conversion by

Dedication and Acknowledgements

To my late father Branko & my mother Jelka, for their patience,
support and most of all, their endurance.

To Angela and Daniel, who never questioned the writing of this book.

To David, for never judging my sister and for giving her new life,
by finding that ad in the Trading Post.

To my sister, thank you for sharing what memories you have left,
albeit painful.

God hands us our lives for purpose and for learning. I need to
believe there was a purpose for your anguish I know there
was learning for us all.

To anyone who is still waiting for someone they love to come home.
Dont ever believe you are alone in your despair. There are more
children out there than we would like to acknowledge and for
many of them, someone, somewhere, like you, is waiting anxiously
and hopefully for them to come home.

Foreword

This is my story about my sister. I was 15 years old when my world changed in a moment that none of us saw coming. I was fumbling awkwardly and typically through life, like every other teenager in Altona North, when I had to do an about-face on everything typical and normal for a girl my age and become as perfect a child to my parents as was possible.

It must have been school holidays but I dont recall that at all, I just know two things: it was Christmas Eve and it was 1979. Those two simple details would become embedded in my mind forever. There was no warning this was going to happen. I was 15 and she was 16.

I kept a diary from the time I was 12, a simple little book inside which I hid my early teen angst and joys away from the world. This little book held within its pages my dreams, my hopes and my childlike fantasies. That same girly diary would morph into becoming my closest friend and my survival tool. Without that diary to confide in, I would have had to find another outlet and I really dont know, or like the idea of, what that might have been. We barely shared our story with anyone as it was happening, for fear of judgment by people who couldnt possibly relate, or understand, especially within the Croatian community. Our secret got bigger and bigger and there was nowhere for it to go. It just grew until it pressed itself against the confines of our walls and ceiling and we competed with it for oxygen.

Mum, Dad and I talked about it, thats all we did. We drank black coffee and we talked. We did that every day before we went on with the pretence that our lives were normal. We werent really even sure what normal was anymore. As lucky as we were to have each other for the most part, sometimes that same luck was our curse. We had no objectivity on our situation and there was no one outside of our little team to give us comfort. We perpetuated our shared fears, guilt and anxieties.

My diary was all I had outside of my immediate family.

I had no idea when I started it that it would become a memoir of her life, not my own. Whenever she told me things, which was a rarity in the beginning, I wrote them down. At first I wrote for no other reason than to relieve my anxiety from the trauma of things she would tell me some of those things were so frightening to my world that I could never share them with Mum and Dad.

Gradually, with time and more stories, my fears that my sisters death was inevitable grew so big, that I became convinced my diarys sole function was to retain every detail, so that it could, one horrible day, serve as evidence and lead us to know how she had been killed and who had done it.

I stored every thought, emotion and detail in these notebooks, which I filled, one after the other; ten books in total.

The words, sentences, stories that I wrote down sometimes in anguish, sometimes in sadness and sometimes even when I was drunk have allowed me to put this book together and share my story. Her story. We didnt have the luxury of computers in the seventies and eighties. I wrote my pages in long hand. There are many parts where I struggle to decipher my own handwriting.

There are also parts where the words reach out like a time machine and yank me back, so that I feel the pain as freshly and as physically as I felt it when I first penned those entries as a teenager. My diaries are now literally and figuratively stored in a dark place. I dont go back there anymore, I cant.

Still, I cant bring myself to throw them away.

This story jumps around a bit and characters quickly come and go. There are so many characters, that it is often difficult to keep track of whos who. That was how it was on the streets. People came and went quickly and it was hard to keep track of them. For every story and character you meet in this book, theres another one I couldnt fit in. Ill apologise now for any confusion, but to turn this story into anything other than what it was would not be a fair, or just representation of my sister, the streets, her friends, the times, or the people she encountered. Most of all it would not be a true telling of her story.

Every one of the people in this book is real. Their names have been changed, but they are, or were, people who played a role in my sisters life. Each had their own story, but frustratingly the details werent always shared with me. When they were shared, theyd be strangely vague, or have dark, gaping holes in them. Thats because there were rules on the streets; you didnt ask questions and if by chance someone volunteered their history, then so be it, you took what they gave you, but you never asked. You never asked and you never judged.