Photos: Babiche Martens
When Ivanka Zonjic was growing up in the 1970s, her parents had one rule at dinnertime: only Croatian would be spoken around the table. The rest of the time, English was fine.
But for Ivanka and her brother Stanko, they stubbornly refused.
“So if we wanted the salt or butter, we would get up and walk around the table to get it instead of asking for it to be passed,” recalls Newstalk ZB’s Time Saver Traffic presenter on the Mike Hosking breakfast show.
“It was naughty of us and I regret that. Now as a Baba [grandmother] to my one-year-old granddaughter Mia, I feel a strong pull to speak Croatian to her and reclaim the cultural roots that shaped who I am. It’s about leaving a legacy of pride and connection for the next generation.”
Over the past 18 months, Ivanka has embarked on a “deeply personal” journey to embrace her family’s heritage. It’s one that’s been more than just paperwork.
It started with changing her surname back to its original spelling, applying for a Croatian passport and citizenship, and taking an emotional trip to visit family in Croatia last year with her fiancé Dylan McKenzie.
Chatting to the Weekly at her parents Ivan and Linda’s house in Epsom, Auckland, it’s often through tears that Ivanka shares of wanting to honour the legacy of both sets of grandparents and her father.
“My maternal grandparents made the brave journey to New Zealand from Novi Vinodolski [a town in Croatia] many years ago. In 1958, my father arrived alone, as a 15-year-old boy with dreams of a better life, to live with his aunty here,” she tells.
Ivan, now 82, says people treated him like a second-class citizen. He went to school at St Paul’s College for a year to learn English, before becoming a mechanic and opening his own garage in Ponsonby. Impressively, he achieved all of by the age of 21.
Like many immigrants at the time, people forced him to change his family name from its original Croatian spelling – Zonjic to Zonich – to accommodate the different phonetic spelling in the English language.
This subtle shift in identity marked the beginning of a cultural disconnect that Ivanka’s felt for much of her life.
“I feel like I’m a fraud because it’s not the name Dad was born with. I’ve been pronouncing my name wrong,” explains the 55-year-old broadcaster.
“I asked Will Maisey [Newstalk ZB’s head of talk], ‘How would you feel if I started saying my name properly when I do the traffic reports?’ He said, ‘You do what you feel is right. It’s what’s important to you.’
“When Dad and I play bowls together, the odd Croatian player there will say to me, ‘We love listening to you in the morning, Ivanka. But you’re not saying your name correctly!’ I reply, ‘I’ve just always said it like that.’
“But now times have changed. In media, people expect the correct Māori pronunciation. So I’m going to say my name correctly. While my dad is still alive, I want to honour that for him. You should be proud of your name!
“It was only when Donald Trump first became president that they started pronouncing his daughter Ivanka’s name properly in America. That was interesting for me.”
Ivan tells a story about son Stanko starting school. Other kids called him Stinky and the teacher called him Stan. “Then one day, the teacher said to us that he doesn’t want to answer to his name any more. I said to her, ‘He won’t answer to that because that’s not his name!’ After that, we had no problem.”
Mum Linda, 76, says she raised her children to embrace their heritage. They took part in traditional kolo dancing and other Coatian customs.
“We always encouraged them to mix with other Croatians and speak the language during dinner, but sometimes they ignored that,” she says. “And I understood why.”
In 1990, when Ivanka was 20, her parents decided to take the family back for a visit for the first time. A year later, war broke out between Croatia and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). Over 20,000 people were killed in the four-year-long war and refugees were displaced on both sides.
Ivanka rediscovered lost connections and unfamiliar histories last year when she returned again to Croatia.
“The whole time there, I was either laughing, crying or drinking!” she reflects. “I loved every minute of it. Dad’s dad is a war hero there. In his village of Kula Norinska, he’s buried in a big concrete monument.
“All these stories I’ve heard, but then when you physically see things, it hits you.
“It’s like I’ve had this big puzzle with pieces missing and I’m finally starting to put all those pieces together,” she says, wiping away tears.
“I’m angry with myself that it’s taken me so long to do it. I should’ve done it when my daughter Danjela was born 27 years ago. But I hope to inspire others to look into their heritage and do something about it.”
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