Barakovska

The Stars That Guide Me

A Refreshing Reflection on Growing up Diverse in Australia

izabela barakovska

Tucked away behind the white picket fence and rosebushes of suburban Australia, warm and timeless, lay my Baba and Dedo’s home. The two-tone colouring wrapped around the red brick facade of the seventies architecture, casting a simple backdrop to the cluster of olive trees in the front yard. By following the cream-tiled road of the veranda to the front door, one would meet a kaleidoscopic vision of glazed green and yellow glass. This sat adjacent to a plastic doorbell that was as incongruous and temperamental as my grandfather’s home renovation pursuits.

Behind the home was a backyard that did our European heritage justice. It was on a hilltop, blessed with old-school corrugated iron, glass tables and matching mesh chairs that hosted weekend suppers and memorable conversations. This set-up faced the green and orange swing set my cousins and I loved. At the apex of a swing, one could look beyond the intertwined grapevines of white and red, onto a patch of Dolce & Gabbana coloured foods and a rotating clothesline of pastels and prints. In contrast were my grandfather’s monochromatic wardrobe choices that helped him - a painter by trade - blend into the patterns of Australian working life.

The bafcha - a blanket term for the garden, which was half the size of the block and fed my grandparents’ souls and time – and, of course, my insatiable stomach - was filled to the brim with red, green and yellow capsicums, tomatoes, mandarins, apricots, onion, garlic, grapes and lemons. It was accented with bundles of parsley, mint, and basil, and dried, roasted red peppers strung up on every conceivable corner of the red brick façade, lighting up the area like a runway to Saint Nik at Christmas time. The path led to the most non-mundane of pet projects: my grandparents’ prize pigeons. I remember Dedo whenever I see one in mid-flight.

The house was a home to our family, ethnicity and culture. Similar to the form of my favourite childhood dish, kifli – filo pastry wrapped into a spiral, filled with feta cheese, and topped with sesame seeds – it was what (and who) was inside the home that counted the most.

I remember sitting on the oval dining table, watching over the glistening sea of the white plastic doily tablecloth on dark brown wood, that made the patterns on the doily twinkle like constellations. Looking to the benchtop covered in dustings of flour, my Baba was behind it cooking up her classic heartful – and stoveful – of tradition, with my younger sister propped up on a chair ‘helping’ shape, twist and pack dough. Beneath the guidance and giggles, you could hear the Macedonian TV in the back, with news, television shows or songs narrating every moment. The old home phone on the wall, and the stainlesssteel fridge covered in photos of all children and grandchildren – I watched the youngest and eldest knead tradition into the family.

It was a residential haven far from familiar Europe, but it was home. It was the baby goat from one neighbour, cheese from another, olives from a third, and strawberries from the fourth. It was a community of mixed ethnics trying to support one another. This, my first childhood home, was where I learned my mother tongue – before AustralianEnglish began dominating my thoughts, conversations and accents. My grandparents, Ordan and Zagorka, carefully wove curated elements of Anglo-Australian and Eastern European culture into their homes and diets.

My grandparents and my mother, Katarina, moved to Australia in 1988 from what was then Yugoslavia, leaving Macedonia behind in pursuit of a better life. I grew up on stories of how Mum ‘didn’t know E from the English language’ when she moved to Perth, and tales from the difficult upbringing of a migrant kid who grew up to become a parent to two adults in a foreign land.

Blessed to have never faced this kind of adversity, I’ve only ever loved and been proud of being Macedonian. There is so much beauty in growing up with one foot in each culture; the food, music, history and language are all as intoxicating as the potent, home-distilled alcohol that marks Balkan nations. It comes, however, with the strain of existing between worlds. Not feeling like either identity, but feeling the unspoken demand to choose for the sake of stability, and a sense of self.

I have always felt too ethnic for my ‘Australian friends’ and also not ethnic enough for my Macedonian friends.

I keep thinking about my family’s tales of adversity, and the tone that carries memories when stories are sung in dinner table conversations. If I personally had not experienced alienation and xenophobia – the kind that slaps you like the freezing water of a lake on Vodici in the Macedonian Orthodox Church – then what is the story I want to tell, and is it worth sharing?

For a kid that enjoys talking – in both languages, might I add – I was taken aback by the difficulty of identifying and articulating my experience. A great deal of the mental tennis match I played in my mind was between the signposts of two identities.

I have always felt too ethnic for my ‘Australian friends’ and also not ethnic enough for my Macedonian friends.

As an ‘Aussie ethnic kid’, born to Macedonian parents and raised in Perth, I’m inclined to look widely at the world around me. Travelling back to Macedonia to visit family and friends was sometimes disillusioning. It highlighted the disparity, as vast as the river Vardar, in the education, healthcare, political transparency, gender equality, access to resources and overall quality of life. Little things like saying going back to Macedonia, in spite of never having lived there, always raised eyebrows around me.

Existing in this limbo of identity marked in badges and photos framed on household walls, and living between histories and identities, has become commonplace. The struggles of minds, memories and traditions across the high number of first- and second-generation migrants in Australia have been displaced over time; the difficult balance of trying to assimilate to a new identity and protect the one you already have, unrecognised.

Bridging the gap between cultures hasn’t been easy. I ate traditional foods at school that didn’t fit the classic cut-outs of lunchboxes, or the party world of fairy bread and party pies. Like in a movie, I had to explain to other kids that kifli weren’t French croissants. It was easy to get frustrated and flustered like a red piperka when multiculturalism was discussed more in the schoolyard than in class.

One exception I recall was a Harmony Day project in year five. Each student was given a chain of plain doll-like figures cut from solid, glossy white paper. Inspired by traditional Macedonian dress, I coloured my paper dolls like little linked narodni Makedonski folk dancers and stuck them to the pinup board dividers of my classroom. They reminded me of the piperki my grandparents hung in their bafcha; elevated, glowing red against the oversized beige bricks behind it.

I took vulnerable steps out of my comfort zone to put my heart out on my sleeve and share and promote the culture that shaped me like my Baba shapes kifli. At my high school, student leaders were the patron saints framed by halos of glowing badges on blazers. I never saw myself in our student leaders and sought to change that in my bid for a position:

“Zdravo, jas sum Izabela Barakovska. Aside from Macedonian, the answer to what that sentence was, is – unique. The direction of this quite ethnic analogy is simply – ‘unity in diversity.’” To speak my truth in front of the school that helped define me was a profound moment in my adolescence. Although I’d been surrounded by brilliant young women, I’d never had anyone to idolise as a strong, proud, multicultural student leader – someone who understood what drove me as a bicultural kid.

I didn’t realise I’d found my footing until I went on the Young Diplomats Tour with United Nations Youth Australia in 2019. It took me literally flying to the Hague, to have one of my most memorable conversations ever; and at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals of all places, speaking to a half Croatian, half Serbian evidence librarian, in Macedonian. Having my minority language recognised and valued at an international institute I dreamed of working at one day was truly awakening.

That tour helped me find and share my voice. I also realised that although my individual story was unique, my experiences were common to others growing up in Australia, Canada, America and beyond. Multicultural nations are unconventional, and my Yugoslav

heritage lies in a country that no longer exists because of the ethno-cultural tensions that tore it apart. The trials I faced growing up were not the stark struggles that are associated with words like racism, xenophobia or prejudice – but I was still influenced by the shadow of these experiences in past generations.

Macedonia, one of the smallest and most geopolitically contentious regions in Europe, proudly - though exhaustedly - fights for its right to sovereignty, history and identity. I pray it doesn’t face the same fate as its Yugoslavic parent - a country that now only exists in the liminal space between its descendants and their living memory, not on the maps they read or the passports they hold.

To simultaneously grow up feeling so proud and connected to my nationality, culture and its people, but to also feel perplexingly, uncomfortably different – it’s almost amazing. In trying to channel a pen mightier than Alexander’s armies, I fight – through my writing, my diaspora, my love of sharing Makedonska cultura - with the same pride and determination.

Much like how the glittering Australian sun against the glass of my grandparent’s front door, illuminated the entrance like stained glass light onto a weathered, familiar pew; it is at the interaction of disjointed, seemingly incompatible cultures and elements that something bright and eye-catching is created. And it’s in that glimmer of multicoloured, fragmented light, that one finds oneself.

Dr. Michael Novak dubbed Australia a “community not of sameness, but of differences.” Growing up with one foot in each world taught me the beauty of championing rich cultures and histories. In the absence of an Alchemist to direct me to the threads of my cosmic tapestry of purpose, I’m guided by the light of two sets of stars - the Southern Cross, and the Vergina sun or Kutlesh star - and their patterns of blue and red, to define myself.