Kabo's road to Australia one of pain and triumph
ROAD TO AUSTRALIA Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra,1998. $29.95.
Vladimir Kabo has written a love story of his life-long passion to know and visit Australia. The book is set in the period from the late 19th century when the Kabo family, of Russian-Jewish descent, began their lives as Mensheviks opposing the Russian monarchy. The book is a long letter from a Russian migrant to his Australian born son, Ralphie. The book is written as a memoir and is faithful to that genre. More important is the underlying biography of Vladimir Kabo, his family and wife Elena (sometimes written Lena or Yelena) Govor who has recently graduated with a PhD from the History Program RSSS, ANU, and published the results (Australia in the Russian Mirror: Changing Perceptions 1770­1919, Melbourne University Press, 1998). Both father (Professor Rafail) and son (Professor Vladimir) were persecuted for their beliefs. Rafail was imprisoned after the 1905 Russian revolution and later under Stalin. Vladimir was similarly sent to a correction centre and a work camp for his scholarly resistance to extreme communist oppression. Kabo takes us through the horrors of the oppressive Tsarist and then the Communist states' attempt to purge Russians generally, and in particular, the Kabo family. He then goes on to tell of their resistance to the authoritarianism of the Russian leaders from Stalin, Krushchev and up to the reform period of the 1980s. We get a picture of Kabo's father and mother (Yelena) struggling to educate themselves and their children, and then being forced to live apart during the 1930s. This was the period which saw Vladimir enter a Moscow school up to the Second World War, and his entry into the Russian Red Army to become one of the liberators of Berlin from German Nazism. Following Vladimir's repatriation from the Red Army he entered the Moscow University until 1949 whereupon he was arrested and detained at the Lubyanka Inner Prison. After three prison moves he ended his confinement at a logging camp in northern Russia, in 1954. On his release he returned to his parents and to University to complete his degree and gained a research posting at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, in Leningrad, where he remained for 20 years. In 1957 he married his first wife Valya, with whom he had a daughter. In 1976 Vladimir look a post at the USSR Academy of Sciences and the following year Valya died. It was not until 1983 that Vladimir married Elena (Lena) Govor, both of whom may be described as Australianists. Passionately they both dreamed of coming to Australia. I met Vladimir in Zagreb (now Croatia) in 1988 with Rhys Jones and, with many other Australian academics, we assisted him and his second wife Lena in their fulfilment of their dream of coming to Australia. All this time Vladimir wrote about, taught and studied ancient, post-contact and contemporary Aboriginal archaeology, anthropology and ethnography. He met Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and Ronald and Katherine Berndt in Russia. For the most part sources were difficult to get and contact with Australianist colleagues was even more so. Ethnography in Russia was much closer to archaeology and history, unlike anthropology in Australia which has been influenced more by American and British traditions than other centres of scholarship. In any event, Fred Rose, the noted British anthropologist maintained contact with him and it was through Rose that Professor Kabo learned of the controversy over the ancient Aboriginal social relations which depicted the transformation from matrilineal to a patrilineal social order and organisation. This controversy helps to explain why Professor Rhys Jones writes an extensive "afterward". Rhys's afterward does more than this - it establishes the scholarly link with what was the eastern-block countries such as East Germany and the USSR, in regard to ethnography and anthropology. In one respect the afterward will strike the unwary as an adjunct, or an anti-climax, to a love story which is wrought with brutality and prejudice, ultimately emerging into the tranquility of Australia. For those, however, who know Rhys Jones and his colleagues, Australian scholars are similarly passionate towards the study of ancient and contemporary Aboriginal social relations. The afterward, therefore, serves as an important part to the road to Australia for Vladimir Kabo and Elena Govor and their loving letter to their Australian-born son, Ralphie. The book is priced for the student (and comes with an all-important bibliography and index), is easy to read and always exciting. I encourage Russian history scholars, Aborigines, and students of modern Aboriginal Studies (archaelogy and anthropology) to read and study this great book. Sadly, this book is one of the last to be published by Aboriginal Studies Press, all scholars will feel a loss. Dr Gordon Briscoe History Program, RSSS, ANU