Ekho Avstralii: Australia's First Russian Newspaper and Its Revolutionary Reverberations

Abstract

In June 1912, Fedor Sergeev, a Russian Revolutionary who had made his way from Siberian exile to Australia, launched a weekly newspaper in Brisbane. Entitled Ekho Avstralii, it would cater to a community of Russian immigrants then said to number approximately 11,000. Sergeev sought by this means to give the immigrants a sense of communal identity and common purpose, and 'uphold the interests of the Russian-speaking worker in Australia'. This article reviews the newspaper's contents and draws attention to some of its journalists and contributors, including the poet Nikolai Il´in and Petr Simonov (later to be Consul), in the Australian context of the time