Author: rivertonAdmin

By Nathalie Apouchtine

 

Every family has fascinating stories from the past. Unfortunately many of us do not become interested in them until it is too late and the relatives who could tell us those stories have passed away.

In exploring my family’s past for No Way Back I have been both unfortunate – and fortunate. I never knew my grandparents: three died before I was born, the fourth lived on another continent. But I have been lucky in that several relatives in my grandparents’ generation left behind accounts of their lives and times: diaries, memoirs, letters, photos… Not a replacement for being able to speak directly to my grandparents, but a treasure trove nonetheless.

I was able to interview members of my parents’ generation, in Canada, France and Russia. They described their own experiences and witnessing of historic events and they also told me more about their parents’ lives and experiences.

While wanting to know more about my predecessors, I have always wondered how people experience turbulent times – how they cope and survive. The twentieth century was not short of dramatic world developments and my relatives found themselves in the middle of some of these: world wars, revolutions, civil war, multiple migrations; in Russia, France – and eventually Canada and Australia.

I travelled to many of the locations where these events occurred to try to get a sense of places which held so much significance for my family.

My goal was to tell about what they lived through and saw through their words, to bring to life these major events. In my own reading of histories, I have always felt a greater understanding and connection to the events being described when there is personal involvement and reflection on what happened: how it played out, how it affected ordinary people, how they coped and moved on – and whether the impacts echoed down the generations.

Of course memory is fallible and often unreliable. Everyone remembers events in different ways. Besides, some record their memories with ulterior motives: to address their descendants specifically, to commemorate a place or time, or sometimes to try to justify their roles in the events. But their experiences and the impacts of them have a truth of their own.

If I occasionally questioned the “facts” in my relatives’ memoirs, I did not question the validity of their memories. At the same time, I wanted to place them firmly within the historical record. This meant searching archives and extensive research in historical texts. But then historians also often disagree – especially on the interpretation of events: why they happened, what they meant, their ongoing significance.

This can be particularly problematic where part of the past one is exploring is of a country where there has been systematic altering of history for propaganda purposes. Still, working in the post-Soviet era, I was able to access archives that had been closed for decades and to consult the work of Russian historians finally able to research more freely. They added to a broad range of sources in the West, on the Russian Revolution, Civil War and the birth of the Soviet Union.

Researching French history of the twentieth century had a different set of complications: the decades of re-examination and debate over events in the Second World War. French historians, and society more generally, have grappled with questions of collaboration, guilt, revenge and punishment – or non-punishment. The discovery of new information about the past, and analysis through the prism of the present, mean many issues in history are hard to put to rest.

I also conducted extensive research on the movements of people, whether as refugees or migrants. While the Russian exodus after the Revolution made up the first major refugee wave of the twentieth century, such mass migration is now something all too familiar, amid the political and social upheaval around the globe. The experiences of migrant countries like Canada and Australia over the twentieth century are part of my family’s story too.

While trying to reconcile differing accounts of the past is challenging, the variety of tellings means history is not frozen – the understanding of any period is dynamic. Keeping in mind the fluidity of history and the pitfalls of eyewitness accounts, I embarked on my task: to blend all these sources into a coherent account of major events in Russia and France in the first half of the twentieth century that would be informative and as accurate as possible. And engaging and interesting for the reader.

Researching and writing No Way Back has been a fascinating journey. I have learned more than I can quantify – both about my family and the crucial events through which they lived. I hope readers of the book find the results of my work equally fascinating.

Migration is the theme of our times. Migration and displacement. On the news daily, and central to the two books launched by Riverton Press earlier this year. In one case, the family members carried the title refugee, in the other, the protagonist is a voluntary migrant.

At the launch of Nathalie Apouchtine’s No Way Back, Revolution and Exile, Russia and Beyond, a member of the public questioned the author about the book title: is there really no way back?

Each migrant, each refugee, each traveller will have their own answer to this question, though a brief glance at world population patterns shows that there is rarely a way back.

Nathalie considered the question in the context of her family, who belonged to the group known as Russian émigrés, who left Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Some members of her family did go back to the Soviet Union, believing that the social experiment in the 1920s was worth contributing to, but for most, a return was probably not possible, for political reasons. New regimes are unforgiving, then as now.

Dodging politics, Nathalie replied: In theory, I suppose you can go back, but in practice, people are leading their new lives and have to concentrate on that daily life. And then there are the children born in the “new country”…

In any case (time travellers excepted), you can’t go back to the past.

In The Legend of Busby, Vittoria Pasquini also ponders the lives of migrants from Italy and other places, and their motivations for leaving their home country. While her book is a very personal memoir based around her sandstone “castle” and the life of a single mother, migration is part of her story, and the thought Could I? Should I? Go back? occurs occasionally.

She considers the migration stories of her friends:

(VOICES OFF)

… that they had left Italy because they had become disillusioned with the fractured dreams of revolution and wanted to venture to a place as far as possible from the place of political defeat, that they wanted to live in the natural wilderness and wanted to learn about Aboriginal culture and the Aborigines, that they had met their great Australian love somewhere … that Australia was less homophobic than their country, that they had come for work and then remained, that they felt free to do and be whatever they wanted …

At the launch, a friend of Vittoria’s, teacher Cesare Popoli, read – nay, declaimed – this segment, with the public slowly beginning to laugh as contrasts become more evident:

…that here it was easy to find work and a place to live … that the beaches were all free  … that here everyone, from the worker to the billionaire, went to the pub all together in thongs … that the dole was easy to get and enough to live on, if only modestly, that a city like Sydney, where the sea was pristine even with four million inhabitants, had parks available every few steps, public swimming pools cheaply accessed, always good weather even in winter, how wonderful it all was!

Vittoria’s book launch was held at the Italian Cultural Institute in Sydney and introduced by Institute Director Paolo Barlera. Translator Gino Moliterni spoke of how he loves Vittoria’s writing. As I didn’t take any notes, I’ll have to quote Italian editor, Oliviero Toscani, who read the Italian book, La Leggenda di Busby, and wrote:

“Vittoria Pasquini’s novel opens up a small world, almost an Australian Brideshead, with its own intensity and a warm gaze, attentive to colour, to small detail. She makes a strong choice in her style, almost a renunciation of a classic plot. We hear a voice with character…”

Nathalie Apouchtine’s launch was held at the NSW Writers Centre in Callan Park, and we enjoyed a Q&A session with her friend and fellow Russian-Canadian-Australian, Lucy Godoroja. Lucy is also an author and historian – she has written a history of buttons titled All Buttons Great and Small. They say their family stories have many parallels – and many differences.

Nathalie’s book examines varied migration stories, as she relates the experiences of many family members. She says that refugees often retain hope of going back to the place they fled – but in the end, that’s usually impossible.

When I was a child, I often heard the phrase “sitting on their suitcases” in reference to Russian refugees in France between the world wars. It was a strong image in my young mind: my relatives, most of whom I knew only from photos… sitting on bulging cases, ready to jump up at a moment’s notice and hurry back to the homeland they had fled …

The loss of nation they suffered was accompanied by loss of citizenship. Nathalie’s parents lived in France for many years, but were not granted something they would have liked: French citizenship. This was an important factor behind their decision to move to Canada. Nathalie (born in France) writes in the book:

When I was born, my papers identified me as a refugee. By the time I was old enough to have any inkling of what that meant… I was a Canadian – and my parents often reminded me to be grateful for this. After more than thirty years of not officially “belonging” anywhere, they had been granted citizenship… they never forgot that [Canada] had let them finally grasp that bit of paper taken for granted by so many, which signified they could stay as long as they wanted, that they had somewhere they could call “home”. 

Poet Colleen Keating says the book No Way Back is “a wonderfully traced family history, interweaving personal stories with world history in an engaging and captivating way. It is a scholarly work, personalised by memoirs, diaries, recorded interviews, eye-witness accounts, old photos, keepsakes, letters and postcards from throughout the 20th century and enriched by the author’s visits in the 1990s to trace the footsteps of her ancestors.”

Colleen continues: “Nathalie makes us, the readers, feel we are unravelling the story together, as she fulfils her father’s aim of being a citizen of the world.  No Way Back is a valuable addition to our Russian history.”

La Leggenda di Busby and The Legend of Busby by Vittoria Pasquini and No Way Back, Revolution and Exile, Russia and Beyond by Nathalie Apouchtine are available in print and electronic formats through usual retail outlets. You may also contact Riverton Press at info@rivertonpress.com

The shipping image is from the National Migration Museum https://digital-classroom.nma.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-07/Yr10_MigrationExperiences_4.jpg

We arrive, we thought to lunch, but instead of tables and chairs we see just chairs in two sets of rows, facing each other in a long wide oval. We mill around, we sit, we see the musicians who wait, like us. For someone to arrive. In due course, the musicians begin, and they play with each theatrical presentation of each dish.

Two sisters speak in Arabic and English about making bread. They sit by a doorway. Talk is part of bread making for women as they form and pound the dough, talk about the kids, the neighbours, and beating harder when they complain about their husbands. “Careful, you’re beating my bread, not your husband!”

Alissar speaks of Za’atar, she paces along the centre and hands out some of the herb, then works with a mallet-sized wooden pestle to grind some. She tells us the wild herb that grows among rocks was declared “protected” by the Zionist colonialist project in the 1970s. Possession of za’atar effectively became illegal. Yes, a wild herb, verboten!

We are served small squares/rectangles of toasty folded bread with za’atar, salt and oil. Several volunteers carry large trays, and we wait as they go back and forth to the kitchen. We wait, and I think of recent TV images: groups of people in Gaza waiting for food handouts because their homes and economies have been destroyed, because aid trucks can’t get in. People who have always put their own food on their tables, now forced to hold out an empty saucepan in the jostling hungry crowd.

Waraq zanab, stuffed vine leaves. The sisters are now behind the kitchen bench, laughing about technical problems with microphones amid accusations of going off script to say things about Mum. For their cooking is all about what they learned from Mum.

Maqloubeh, Miriam speaks at length and with love and smiles in Arabic about this dish, and though we are given what seems like a very short translation, I am charmed by Miriam. The dish is baked, the baking dishes are overturned on a table placed in the centre for us to see each baked rice and eggplant dish come out cleanly. Some are vegetarian, some have chicken, they are served with yoghurt and roasted nuts. Delicious, it’s all yummy.

The violinist speaks to us about the stealing of culture by the Zionist invasion, for instance, Palestinian songs are taken, translated and sung in Hebrew, with no acknowledgement of their Palestinian origins. He plays a beautiful violin solo for us.

Two of the three sisters of the 3Tomatoes Café are back in the kitchen, this time talking of Fattoush. They tell us how their mum made them help in the kitchen, how they hated that as kids, how grateful they are now. Fattoush is a salad with tomatoes, cucumber, radish, herbs and spices and crumbed bread.

We are given a final gift, Kamouneh, a spice mix with rose petals. Everyone is given a small jar, it’s a scent for calming the nerves, for strengthening the spirit. Paula tells us that women used to go out even during military curfews to find the ingredients.

Then the musicians perform Ya Bahriyeh, a song by Lebanese oud player Marcel Khalife that, we are told, has come to represent resistance, and we dance. Some of the Palestinian women had danced earlier, but this time we dare to join them. And we sing too, as we had been given copies of the text, and we manage at least the chorus.

Riverton Press was very fortunate to attend this excellent RedSeeds and Third Space Production of food, theatre, music and dance, presented by chefs, cooks, story tellers and musicians at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre in Callan Park, Sydney.

Today, images of Gazan people trying to return to what might be left of their homes in northern Gaza impose themselves upon similar images from 1948, when they fled during the Nakba, and from 2023, when again, they were forcibly displaced.

Photo, 1948, from the Middle East Institute http://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2021-05/Palestinian%20refugees%20fleeing%20their%20homes%20near%20Haifa%2C%20June%201948%20Credit_%20Corbis.png

Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza walk towards the south. Photo, Reuters, November 2023. https://i.tribune.com.pk/media/images/image_2023-11-09_21_58_191699549216-0/image_2023-11-09_21_58_191699549216-0.png

And today, people who left northern Gaza after October 7, 2023, heading back there:

Photo, Reuters, 27 January 2025.

Throughout the year of 2024, Riverton Press has been thinking about Rome and Russia, migration and exile. Both our upcoming books speak of migration. Sure, people have always moved around the planet, but today we have unprecedented levels of displacement. Mostly due of course to the same four old horsemen. (Do they never tire?)

Our two new books are very different, one the result of deep family history research, the other a personal memoir that examines the self through life in a “sandstone castle”. Both books are written by women born in Europe who have migrated to Australia, one via France and Canada, one via Italy and Kenya.

No Way Back, Revolution and Exile: Russia and Beyond by Nathalie Apouchtine spans three generations, three continents and more than 100 years. Her family left Russia following the 1917 Revolution, some travelled alone, some in groups, many lived in France, very few of them ever return to Russia.

Apouchtine has written a wonderful family history, including her own stories of the research process. Based on recollections, interviews, letters and travel, the book vividly illustrates the impacts of national histories on personal lives. Much of this story of course was made in other languages, mainly in Russian and French. The book includes 16 pages of photos of her family members.

The Legend of Busby by Vittoria Pasquini is also published as La Leggenda di Busby.

Yes! Riverton Press is releasing the books in two languages, the English version has been translated from the Italian by Gino Moliterno.

Pasquini’s memoir, written in the third person, is a journey inward, a journey through the rooms of the sandstone house, a non-linear telling of life experiences. We move around Rome, Nairobi, Sydney and Canberra via the table of family and guests, an unloved laundry, a shared bathtub. It’s a generous table. As Filippo la Porta says in his introduction, “a cosmopolitan space where diversity is fraternally welcomed”.

The Busby Legend and Leggenda will be released in late November, with a launch in Bondi. No Way Back will be released soon after.

The covers of the books are stories in themselves, the illustration of the Busby house and legend was made by one of Pasquini’s young granddaughters.

Some months ago, Voices of Women Inc called for texts by women about the Riverina. Not just any text, but 800-word stories to be read and acted in performance, short monologues by women of the Riverina on Wiradjuri Country. Themes were to be based on personal experience with something about resilience.

Voices of Women is a not-for-profit organisation that presents new work by Australian women writers by powerful women actors, and collaborates with artists and musicians. https://voiceswomen.com/

I’m a woman from the Riverina, so I thought I’d “have a go”, but when I finished my 800 words I realised that I had not written what you would call a story. I sent it off anyway by the due date, with a note saying I realised it wasn’t on cue, and sure enough, it was not what they wanted for personal monologue performance. So I’ve decided to post the text here as a blog, as Riverton Press was born in the Riverina.

the land I love

When I sit at the rowing machine in a Sydney gym, I imagine I’m on the Murrumbidgee. As a 10-year-old, I was never in the tinnie on my own because the river is treacherous but now I forget the gym and row, willows on one side, a gumtree woodland on the other.

When I go back to Wagga at flood time, I can’t get enough of looking at the lagoons and billabongs, I know the Library is sand-bagged and soggy, the caravan park at Wagga Beach has been moved off-site, I’ve had to drive around because Eunony Bridge is closed and Oura’s under water, but I love it, the water, the birds, the reflections, the green.

I also love it when it’s dry and the colours are those of dry grass and red sand or dusty loam. This also is a time of tension, of worry about fire and wind. My mother used to fret: Why haven’t the neighbours cut their grass?

When I hear the crows in Sydney, I hear their eternal lament (what is their trouble exactly??), and I miss the accompanying voices of the sheep. I was never any good at school choir, this was the soundtrack. I didn’t know then that laughing jackasses (as my father called them) and raucous cockatoos are unique, that the rest of the word has no idea of the scandal of yellow-crested squawking birds descending on your fruit trees.

I lived some years in Mexico City, I rode the busy subway, crowded buses, collective taxis, I attended large concerts and demonstrations. In short, I learned to be part of the masses, and while learning this I would remember the spaces where I grew up, the space many Australians take for granted. As a child I didn’t know that the Milky Way would not be with me every night, that those wide horizons and mirages on the roads would shrink in accordance with my urban choices.

My family knew of course that we weren’t the first on our patch of land, and our white fella history was brief. The old man (my grandfather) had moved there in 1927, he and his sons had planted willow trees all along the riverbanks. That’s an unfortunate choice in today’s knowledge, as the willow has proved a pest, but it made for a very pretty outlook and was enjoyed by the cows (another bad choice) who enjoyed the shade and ate all leaves within reach. We only had a few cows, milkers, our farm was defined as sheep and wheat. There was a stand of eucalypts along the river flat that suggested the original vegetation. Next door, a series of billabongs filled and emptied with the seasons. White fella had used one of these as a tip for tins and bottles (those days were pre-plastic), in a show of his feckless land and water management. There was a similar tip in a gully near the river on our farm, though we never used it. Obviously the plan of my grandfather’s generation was for the river to take their rubbish away…

Those eucalypt stands were full of the land’s past history, that of the Wiradjuri people, we commonly saw scarred trees and would hazard guesses about a canoe or shield being made there. Up on the sandhills was a spot with ash coloured soil, made I suppose, of sand and ash, my father called it a “blackfella’s oven”. I could feel the presence of the Wiradjuri, yet I wondered where they were, I was not told of invasion, massacres, discrimination and social exclusion. Yet I wondered, why is this water on the road to Narrandera called Poison Waterholes Creek? I could not understand that anyone could poison a water supply, when surely everyone of whatever colour needed that water.

My parents sold the farm in the 1970s, to a family, not a corporation, and I saw the place 30 years later. I was astonished at how it had moved to what I could only call agro-industry, with bigger machinery and irrigation installations, metallic silos.

Even when I was a child, we knew that hard-hoofed animals were bad for our soil. I could see on the farm how much land had been cleared for cropping, but at least we still had paddock trees. Today’s big farming and pivot irrigation don’t allow for trees. I have flown over the Riverina, and find it devastating to see the vast areas of cleared flat land dedicated to monocrops.

We all need food, but country will have to be very resilient indeed to survive our farming practices and the challenges of climate change. It is not improbable to imagine the Milky Way shining over an earth empty of all that which was given us.

Photos from Narrandera and Tumut, New South Wales.

Our next book is a family chronicle wrapped up in history: the Russian revolution and civil war, two world wars and multiple migrations. The story spans three continents and more than a hundred years, covering events that confronted three generations of the author’s family.

Nathalie Apouchtine is a print and broadcast journalist and historian. She worked as a news reporter, sub-editor and producer in radio and television for the Canadian and Australian Broadcasting Corporations and Australia’s SBS. Later Nathalie turned to history, focussing on media and immigration in the twentieth century. Her research culminated in a PhD and provided the foundation for No Way Back. Nathalie was born a refugee in France and now lives in Australia.

The book brings to life fascinating and critical events of the twentieth century. It is based on personal memories, diaries, letters, interviews, photographs and an extensive archive of official documents.

Just to read the “shortened” bibliography of the book shows a little of Nathalie’s thorough historical research, and gives a glimpse of the fascinating world of Russian émigrés. That world was with me the other day when I visited the Kandinsky exhibition at Sydney’s NSW Art Gallery, which was excellently if briefly documented, enough to give an idea of the disruption of world history on one personal artistic life. Wassily Kandinsky lived most of his life outside his native Russia, but was there during the First World War and the early years of Sovietism. Later he too lived in France, like many members of the Apouchtine family.

Riverton Press will publish a book next year by Italian author Vittoria Pasquini, a text that has been translated into English by Gino Moliterni. We have discussed the merits and demerits of bilingual publications as we prepare The Legend of Busby.

A friend and colleague of Vittoria has translated the children’s book Leonard the Lyrebird, written by Jodie McLeod and illustrated by Eloise Short, and a bilingual edition exists of Leonard, l’ucello lira. The translator, Mirella Alessio, told me I could contact that author – she lives in the Blue Mountains.

Riverton Press was there recently wandering the paths near the Three Sisters and saw a sculpture of a lyrebird perched on a railing. Not 20 metres distant was a real lyrebird sitting on the same railing watching the morning and cleaning her feathers. Then she changed her balance, spread the wings of her magnificent tail and took off.

This reminded me of the book and I decided to find Leonard the Lyrebird. I went to the bookshop near the food co-op in Katoomba and asked man behind counter, who immediately took me to Leonard and her companion Lilah the Lyrebird. He didn’t know about the Italian version. Suddenly a voice from man behind door, the one I hadn’t seen. He knows Jodie, he’ll text her. And he did, right then and there. The other man took my phone number and would be in touch. I resisted buying any book as I had a bush walk ahead.

I was sitting on a wooden bench in wonder at the flowering wild waratahs at Govetts Leap and checked my phone, there was a message, not from the bookshop, but from the author herself. She gave me her address and said she’d be going out but would leave Leonard on the verandah and I could leave money under mat.

The waratahs had pleased and amazed me, this message only compounded my joy, restoring a little of my damaged faith in human kindness and trust.

The one person I know in Katoomba gave me a lift to Jodie’s place in another act of generosity. Next morning, at a different bookshop (sorry, LITTLE LOST BOOKSHOP, but we were in another town!), this driver purchased three books, the lyrebirds Leonard and Lilah, and the one I’d resisted the day before, the latest from Jodie McLeod and Eloise Short, The Black Cockatoo With One Feather Blue. I bought this last one too, for Eileen.

One thing more: on my second early morning walk around Echo Point I saw the lyrebird again. I remembered my father‘s simple response when I made a comment one day about a willy wagtail flitting from tree to fence. He lives here, he said.

And now, back to the original question, bilingual books, do they work? They certainly do for students of language and of translation, and is wonderful in the case of Leonard, l’ucello lira with its rich onomatopoeic vocabulary, as the book has a QR code link to the audio version in Italian.

Pix from around Govetts Leap and Echo Point. As you can see, the lyrebird is not balanced on a railing! This sculpture is closer to Blackheath.

We relaunched our books in Newtown last week with Penny O’Donnell as launcher-in-chief, Ruth Adler, co-editor of the Journeys anthology, as the one who remembered to give thanks to all those who helped make Journeys happen, and Jacqueline as MC.

Jeanie Lewis told us about her friend Hector Caicedo, co-star of her contribution to Journeys, and sang us a Woody Guthrie song: the Deportees. Jenny Pollak also told us the back story of her poetry in the book and read some of her magnificent work.

Penny made the point that, for the Australian women who contributed to Journeys, living in Mexico made our lives bigger, and that’s true, Mexico amplified our experience and our understanding. That latter, the understanding, may have come after months or years of not understanding how Mexico works, but the opportunity for that search was invaluable. I am reminded of Mariko, my Japanese neighbour for a time in Tepoztlán, Morelos, who used to say: “It’s not a matter of trying to understand Mexico, you just have to get it.”

Penny quoted Nelson Mandela – There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

She acknowledged Journeys co-editor Jenny Cooper, still in Mexico, for her work establishing the Mexico National University’s gender and economics program, under the motto: Por una economía feminista que apuesta por la sostenibilidad de la vida – For a feminist economy that is committed to the sustainability of life.

Can I read another poem, asks Jenny Pollak, is there enough time? We poets have so few opportunities to speak…

I was MC, I had no idea if the clock gave us more or less time, but all the audience knew that yes, we had time for Jenny’s next poem, the one she’d written that morning.

It turned out we didn’t have much time and Lily of the bookshop sold some books and said we had to leave. That was a pity because the room was full of people who knew each other from different parts of our lives, which made for a great atmosphere. I was the last to leave, except for Lily of Better Read than Dead, who was left alone with the books, the wine glasses, the accounts, closing the shop. King street on Friday night was buzzing, the busiest place I’ve been since I walked the streets of Madrid the year before Covid.

Thanks to Elspeth and Conrad for taking the photos. Thanks to Ruth and the bookshop for helping organise the event, to our speakers Ruth, Penny, Jenny and Jeanie, to Raewyn Connell and Manon Saur, who contributed to the Journeys anthology and were there that night. Thanks to all the contributors who gave us their insights into their time in Mexico, and to you, our readers!