Description
Between 1912 and 1919 seven weekly Russian newspapers were published in Australia. Today they are little known and the small but vocal community which produced them is largely forgotten. Unlike the enthusiastic nineteenth-century Russian accounts of Australia seen in From St Petersburg to Port Jackson (ASP 2016), these newspapers show us a body of immigrants struggling to establish themselves in what some had viewed as a ‘working man’s paradise’ and adjust to a new life. Educated radicals and newly literate workers of various political persuasions expressed their opinions, along with representatives of the Russian Empire’s different ethnic groups, feeling increasingly that they were ‘voices crying in the wilderness’. With rising militancy in 1918–1919, the editors attracted enhanced scrutiny from Australia’s security agencies, and by late 1919 most of the journalists had left Australia or been deported. The rich material presented in this digest is an unrivalled source of information on Russian settlement in Australia and the broader social history at a critical historical moment.
