Ebony Nilsson

I first met Boris Frankel when he was a thirteen-year-old, in the pages of a file at the National Archives of Australia. I was working on Russian migrant families in Australia that decided to return to the Soviet Union, but then tried to come back to Australia. Boris and his sister Genia had travelled more than 1,500 kilometres from the Crimea to Moscow, alone, in 1959, in the hopes of persuading British authorities to allow their return to Australia. It was a remarkable story: two teenagers who negotiated Soviet bureaucracy and surveillance, made an impassioned plea, and secured the support of a British ambassador. The file even contained letters the children had written to Prime Minister Robert Menzies – their own, teenaged voices. Letters like this are a historian’s dream: I felt I had got to the heart of the story. And yet, in Boris Frankel’s historical memoir, No Country for Idealists, I saw the trip to Moscow anew. In the texture of Frankel’s narrative – their Siberian cabin-mate on the train journey (named Rasputin!), the ambassador’s chef who cooked them breakfast – the wonder of the journey emerged afresh.

In this week’s ABR Podcast, historian Ebony Nilsson tracks the lives of mid-century migrant Australians with the aid of ASIO and CIA files. Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, the current ABR Laureate Fellow, and recently published her first book, Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West. Listen to ‘The lives of ‘ordinary’ people: From Siberia and Shanghai to Kings Cross’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

It was mid-afternoon when I turned a typewritten foolscap page from 1939 and found the name I had been searching for: Detective Sergeant Mischenko. The report was a pretty banal cry for resourcing. Poor Mischenko was doing the work of two detectives in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and desperately needed some assistance. On turning the page, I felt like Archimedes himself (though running through the US National Archives yelling ‘Eureka!’ might have been a touch dramatic). My journey to the suburbs in the middle of a clammy Washington DC summer had held no guarantees of finding this.

On election day in 2022, thousands of Australian voters – perhaps already in line at their local primary school, democracy sausage in hand – received this text message. Refugees had not been a hot-button issue in this election, and the messages were generally seen as an unsuccessful last-ditch effort by a Coalition government already on the ropes. But the new Albanese Labor government was quick to confirm, just a day after being sworn in, that it had turned the boat back without hesitation. A public warning was issued to people smugglers that Australia’s border policy remained iron-clad and inflexible. Such statements are usually for the benefit of the Australian public, rather than an imagined audience of people smugglers.

We often talk about refugees in terms of crisis: ‘unprecedented’ floods of thousands, waves of humanity displaced and now knocking at the door somewhere else. The scale can indeed be staggering. World War II displaced perhaps two hundred million people (one in every ten), worldwide. Figures like this are almost paralysing. How to solve a crisis of this scale, let alone attend to any one refugee’s needs? The experiences of ordinary people, the personal dimensions, are often lost. How do you find the individual in those millions? This is what Ruth Balint does so deftly in Destination Elsewhere: conveys the immense scale of the postwar refugee crisis, but also sketches faces, personalities, and the triumphs, hardships, and failings of individuals. It is a history that feels very human.