The invisible city of Kitezh down under

	The marginality of Australian settlement prompted Bruce Chatwin to consider how it might have been otherwise if a different people had colonised the continent. In Songlines, he presents Alice Springs through the eyes of Arkady Volchak, son of a refugee Cossack. Chatwin and Volchak—‘a Pom and a Com’— develop a common antipathy to the local white residents, or kardiya… What would have driven Russians to the other end of the world? And what role might they play in Australian society, beyond buyers of cheap real estate?
	In 1940, the daughter of one of these refugees, Nina Maximov, encouraged Clem Christesen, of Danish descent, to establish the Meanjin journal in Brisbane. Her childhood in St Petersburg gave her a belief in the importance of intellectual life, despite the lack of precedent in Brisbane. This belief and guidance helped Christesen found the journal and bring it eventually to Melbourne, where it became a vehicle for cultural debate in the post-war period.
	In The Hand that Signed the Paper, Demidenko told the story of World War 2 atrocities through the eyes of Slavic collaborators. There was nothing else like it being published in Australia; it subsequently won the Vogel Literary Award, the Miles Franklin award, and the Gold Medal from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. The Miles Franklin citation contrasted this kind of literature with ‘fiction about the more vapid aspects of Australian life’… This, it seems, is one of the questions left begging after the Demidenko affair. Is there nothing in Australian culture to give expression to the ‘Russian-ness’ of life—the tragic circumstances of people who are powerless to resist authority, yet must win honour for themselves in defeat?
	Within two weeks Tatiana had been processed by the popular media into an Australian girl, with her image on the cover of New Idea. From the taut, focused young Amazon of the Olympics, she became a made-up doll dressed entirely in pink. Rather than close-ups of her grim determination, the article featured a succession of cheesy grins. In contrasting her gloomy life in Russia with the bright prospects in Australia, New Idea transformed the intense Russian Grigorieva into ‘our Tatiana’.
	…like Demidenko, Wongar’s vision is tainted by resentment. His prime objective does not seem to be a close understanding of Aboriginal culture—Wongar uses the indigenous cause to draw sympathy for the victimisation of Serbs at the hand of Muslim invaders. His violent novel Raki draws a parallel between police brutalisation of native Australians and Ottoman oppression of the Serbian nation. It is as much a blind imposition of a foreign paradigm as the importation of the English garden to Australia.
	"During one particularly severe drought, my grandmother insisted on accompanying us boys out on a fishing trip. She wrapped the icon in cloth and took it with her. When we stopped in our spot, she started mumbling and praying in a weird way. Then she got out the icon and threw it into the water. That was it. It just sunk with all that metal on it. No way anyone would find it now. It didn’t stop the drought, though."
	The Guerassimoff story represents a negative encounter between Russians and Australia—a dramatic loss of tradition and assimilation into the sacred Queensland code. But what did the original Guerassimoffs expect to find here, and why did the grandmother throw the prize family possession, preserved at great cost during the journey south, into the blue depths of the Pacific Ocean? Did she wish they had thrown their religious clutter into the Japanese sea rather than lose a son? Or was there another darker reason, buried in the Old Believer psyche?
	Govor’s highly embroidered history, My Dark Brother, provides a detailed account of how an incarnation of the Russian nineteenth century ideal managed to take root in Australian soil. In this life of a Tolstoyan in Queensland, there lies a clue to why the Guerassimoffs cast their family heritage into the sea.
	"Here in Australia I have become convinced that the religion of the Aborigines has not died out. Rather, in those places where it seems to have disappeared, it has temporarily descended into the hidden recesses of the spirit, below the surface, like an underground spring, to break the surface again at some future time. The religion of their ancestors remains for them just such an underground spring, nurturing them and helping them to build their lives in a new reality, even though that religion was never unchanging, and it continues to change, revealing the potential it carries within it." (Vladimir Kabo)
	The Soviet fantasy Amphibian Man (1961) tells the story of a Russian scientist forced to pursue his research in a Spanish seaside town. His son, Ichthyander, suffered a lung complaint which his father cured by transplanting the gills of a shark. Forced to live below water for long periods, the professor consoles his son with dreams of an impending underwater utopia, where there are no class distinctions. Eventually, the world catches up with the pair and the son is forced to escape. He assures his father that he will survive far away in the south seas—in the land of Australia.

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