pictures of the sugar cane farm at Yuruga near Ingham North Queensland

To start the ball rolling i will upload a memoir of Phillip John Gitnikov written for a module for my Masters so it has been pared down to the required number of words still an over view of Poppy's life.

Born in Siberia - The Tale of a Pioneer

The paper is dry to touch, a page from a jotting book. Carefully folded in a wooden box, it has survived the humid summers of North Queensland, all those years. The words are written in broken English. Dated the 31st October 1969, it is a lifetime old. This is a draft for a letter. Phillip is congratulating his daughter on the birth of her first grandchild. He is sending her money, to buy a present for the baby. On the reverse side there are answers to questions she had asked him. They had been questions about him. Where did he come from? Who was his family? How did he come to be where he is now?

He writes:

I come from a real Russian family who came from the Caspian Sea of Russia itself. We lived on the Volga River. Mum and me was born in Ussurrysk, eighty miles from Port Vladivostok, in Far East of Russia, on the Japanese Sea.

I hear his song voice now, faint, stirring in my memory.

He had taught mathematics for six years, before going to war in 1914, first with Japan and then to the Eastern front in Germany.  After being wounded in the leg, he and his men were captured. Kindness from a German woman, who brought goats’ milk to the prison camp, kept him alive. It was five years before he returned home. 

Next in this collection of documents there is a photo of a young soldier in dress uniform. He wears a faint smile of pride and a decoration on his chest. This photo was taken when he was awarded the Saint George Cross.  The Tsar, Nicholas, had presented it, in a ceremony at St Petersburg.

I hear him talk of Rasputin, and days in a wintered palace, so far from a tropical sun.

Russian prisoners of war were released after the signing of the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk in 1918. It took over a year to make the journey from Germany to Siberia.

The moments that make a year, can shape patterns that fashion a life.  The sound of feet, so many feet, marching, trudging, dragging through mud and rocks and snow, come echoing through time.

The dream of going home, even when no one knew what that meant anymore, kept them moving. The imprint of footsteps, following telegraph poles, following train lines so as not to lose the way, continued past the Ural Mountains and beyond through Siberia. They passed black scars of villages, sites of past happiness, left by the Bolsheviks. Families lost to each other, wandering without purpose, looking for reunion. Not knowing who was dead, who was alive, who was a friend, or who was an enemy.

As they moved eastward the beliefs that had sent them to defend Russia, so many years ago, fell away. There was no home anymore, no God, only Mother Russia. No reasons beyond the will and the need to survive.

The year is 1919. In Ussurysk he reunites with Marina, a family friend, and these two fragments of families join, to make a unit of familial trust. Leaving behind anchors that hold us to a place, their decision was to leave Russia. With the Bolsheviks chasing him they fled the country, in hay carts, bound for Haerphin in China. He was looking for a peaceful life, an end to war. No going back, ever. Never again able to seek those lost in youth, or war and revolution. They moved on to Shanghai.

Beneath the photo lies more yellow paper, older than the last. So fragile, it falls away as I pick it up. It lays there, four tattered remnants on the table. Missing fragments where the paper is weak from being folded and refolded. This is an official document. The vertical lines of Chinese calligraphy look like black lace on paper.

One of the fragments has a photo pasted to it. It is a picture of a man in a serge suit with a high collared, white shirt and a dark tie. It is a young mans face, with brown hair above a high, wide forehead, his fair eyes looking out beyond the camera. His face, fashioned to the look we assume for official document photos, tells nothing of the man. It is a picture of a good looking man with a neat mustache. The photo is stamped, in purple, with a circular seal, Commissioner of Russian Affairs Shanghai.

I turn over a piece carefully. It is printed with Russian Cyrillic characters and there is a date: October, 1923. An address is recognizable, 39 Paorshan Road, Shanghai.

I look at the characters. What did this mean all those years ago?

They had left Russia, with money and jewels sewn into the hem of clothing. In the 1920s Shanghai was a bustling city with a large expatriate community. There were many White Russians living there before moving on to permanent citizenship elsewhere. The plan had been to be on the next boat to America. When their valuables were stolen, they worked for the fare to America. For two years he managed a theatre in Shanghai, and then bought tickets for a steamer to Australia. From Shanghai they sailed through the East China Sea to the Coral Sea, from ancient silver birch forest to ancient eucalypt, where a life begins.

There are several small black and white photographs, losing their contrast to time. Edges fading to white. Some are roughly trimmed as if they have been developed at home.

I choose one. It too feels dry and brittle, but with a satiny finish to the image.

Chickens fill the foreground. Phillip holds a bucket in his hand and is tanned from days in the sun. Close by, on a chair, sits his wife with a baby on her lap, a toddler stands beside her. Behind is a house on stilts, with a corrugated iron upper gable and a roof that cantilevers out to form a verandah. The windows are fashioned from wooden panels that are propped open with struts to catch the breeze and light. It is the original farmhouse at Yuruga, fifteen miles south of Ingham and a few miles north of the railway siding at Bambaroo. In a place called Scrub View.

Three other Russian couples arrived in Australia with them. He found work cutting sleepers for the Cairns rail link being built near Cardwell. They lived under canvas, learning the strange sounds of the tropical rainforest.  Soon there was money enough to buy a twenty acre bush plot with ten acres assigned to sugar cane. The land required clearing before anything could be planted. It cost ten pounds an acre.

They had taken charge of their lives and began to look forward. It took some months to build a house, rough hewn, from the timber on their land. They caught barramundi in the creek and watched the territorial dance of pythons on its banks.

The next photo shows a pair of draught horses pulling a plough through a field. Dense bush grows close in on the paddock boundary. The horses are magnificent, huge, dark creatures that dwarf the man guiding them from the plough. These horses also pulled a dray that took harvested cane to the railway siding at Scrub View. For personal transport they used a sulky and a mare called Penny.

I pick up the next photo. Two men are standing in front of a field lush with sugar cane, each has a cane knife. Broad brimmed hats throw sharp shadows onto their faces. They are trimming leaves off uprights of cane.

At first all the cutting was done by hand, a Herculean task.

Later teams of cane cutters came each year to help with the harvest.

I hold two pictures now, both are of a Model A Ford flattop truck. In one of these pictures the truck is laden with sugarcane. The attitude of the driver, hunched over the wheel, face intent on the road, makes it seem as if it is belting along a bush track at some speed. It had a green bonnet and a wooden bench seat, with a wooden tray on the back. In 1925 it was the second motor vehicle in the district.

Along with the purchase of the truck came a Fordson tractor. Its’ steel wheels had five inch spikes to hold the soil. These vehicles allowed the farm to prosper further. By buying adjoining farms, he slowly increased his holding to two hundred and fifty acres.

  

One of the photos has a deckle edge. It is of a woman, dressed in white, standing next to a dark Chevrolet Utility. From the shadow of the cabin a crooked arm is casually hugging the window sill of the car. The utility is parked in a flowering garden, alongside a farmhouse.

The year is 1935. The Chevrolet was shiny maroon, with a canvas top. The Russian women established a sewing business in Ingham. They did fine embroidery, tailoring and dressmaking, and grew flowers for weddings. Sugar harvests had been bountiful and despite the depression they started to prosper.

The next picture, though the smallest, is the most impressive. It is a beautifully composed shot of a man on a tractor. The sky fills two thirds of the picture. Straight furrows in the soil meet at a point far on the horizon. The man has turned on his seat to face the camera. It has the construction of a Soviet Propaganda poster extolling the merits of the agrarian life.

This tractor is a Ford. Its back tyres were filled with water to create traction on the heavy loam. For Christmas, in 1949, they bought a new red truck, International branded across the bonnet. An upholstered bench seat sat high above the road. It was a bouncy ride.

In 1955, they moved closer to Townsville, about a mile beyond the edge of town. It was an area of small market gardens and dusty horse paddocks. Halfway into the journey, the clumps of chonky apple trees beside the road became thick and bitumen turned to dirt. Not yet touched by the city it was quiet and still at night.

There were five acres in all. One acre was under chook, on a free range plot. The chook shed was a dark, rambling place made of tree stumps, corrugated iron and chicken mesh. Wooden benches for the laying boxes lined the walls. Fresh straw was set in the boxes and in some were placed ceramic eggs to encourage laying hens. Collecting eggs was a gentle and patient task.

I remember when he called to me to show me something that he held. In his cupped farmer’s hands were half dozen small eggs and as we watched they hatched. Small black snakes emerged. He impressed on me the wonder and danger of what he held. Then I saw their mother, a red bellied black lying dead on the grass near the stairs.

Produce of all varieties were grown in the front paddock, one season corn, another, watermelons. On the edge of the field, facing the house, dahlias and gladiolas grew. The lawn, cool and deep, was sprinkled with rich color and contrast from shrubs and clumps of lilies. Orchids, collected from the edge of the rainforest after tropical storms, grew old alongside their gardeners.

The soft, earthy, velvety smell of phlox, growing wild in the lawn, comes, fresh, from so long ago.

The last photo is of an old, bespectacled, man standing next to a grey Falcon Station Wagon. Dressed in khakis, he is round shaped but strong. He has the neatly trimmed mustache he had always worn. The Akubra hat, which had become a permanent fixture for outside use, protected his fair European skin from the tropical sun. He is looking directly at the camera.

This is the man that I knew as my grandfather. A quiet man. His gentle eyes and belly shaking laugh remain a precious memory.  I didn’t know the war hero or the person in the other photographs. I knew this man. I had learned to read the newspaper as he indicated the words, learning English, as he had done many years before. I had laughed with his silly sense of humour and been sung to sleep by a Russian lullaby.  He was a spiritual man who believed in the awe of nature, and a mathematician who liked new inventions.  He was a proud Australian.

These are the anchors that hold the essence to my memories of Poppy.

Now I pick up another letter. It too, is old by now. It has been passed to me after being sent to other family members scattered around the globe. It too is written on coarse jotting paper but is from Russia. From strangers who are my family, telling of two sisters who had survived the revolution. As existence adds to existence the blood line lives on, in Ussurrysk and Volvograd. Phillip had spent a lifetime wondering, how happy he would have been.

They want to make connection with lost family. Shall I seek them out, as they have sought out us? Are they like him?  Was his gentle, intelligent nature refined in the hardship of war and displacement? Or the joy of a life lived bravely and fully? As patterns come full circle and lost pieces are found, the design is seen to be as big as the globe and larger than just one life. It seems the ties that bind are still strong and questions that burn need answers that only blood can supply.