THE GOLDEN SIBERIAN

 For some reason people are sending me death threats on X. I honestly don’t know why. I think if the the police wanted to find out who opened this X account that is sending me death threats, they can! I think they just don’t want to! Why?

     My mother was born in Barabinsk, Siberia. My father would taunt her by playfully calling her a 'Mongolka' (Mongolian woman), she did after all live among the Kyrgyz people in Kazakhstan for a considerable time. She often spoke well of these people however she was somewhat miffed when she recalled that they referred to my mother's family as Urus Jaman (Dirty Russians). It is interesting that the Kyrgyz equated Ukrainians and Russians as the same people, even in those days.

My mother and her sisters attended a Ukrainian Baptist church every week, my father never went to this church and occasionally would go to the Russian Orthodox Church. Occasionally I went with my father because I liked travelling through the inner suburbs of Melbourne by tram on a Sunday morning. Melbourne was always deserted on a Sunday in the 1970s.  I remember in my teens I consciously was deciding whether to identify as “Ukrainian” or Russian. My mother had just returned from visiting her brother’s family in Montreal, Quebec. My mother asked me if I would be interested in accompanying her in the event of her returning there to live. I did give it some thought but was hesitant because my uncle was a Ukrainian nationalist and was incredibly rude and insulting to me some years previous when he visited us. I don’t think he respected the fact that my father was a Russian from Kursk. Both of my mother’s sisters lived in Essendon. Essendon was the centre of the Ukrainian community in ...