Digitised service records (NAA)

Digitised Embarkation roll entry (AWM)

Alien registration (NAA)

Rosalieff - Soviet Commissary Russia (digitised file) (NAA)

Николай Розалиев, "Одиссея Нины Никитиной"

Blog article

Russian

English

Newspaper articles

"Like Russian Cossacks". - Daily Standard, Brisbane, 15 October 1913, p. 5.

Н. Розальев. Письмо в редакцию. - Рабочая жизнь, Брисбен, 11.04.1917, с. 4.

From Russian Anzacs in Australian History:

While researching my book My Dark Brother (the story of Ngadjon Aboriginal Kitty Clarke and her Russian husband Leandro Illin), I was looking through their daughter Flora Hoolihan's papers. There I came across a bundle of Russian postcards, of around 1911-12, sent by his Russian comrades-in-arms to Nicholas Rosalieff, a socialist revolutionary who fled from exile in Siberia to Australia in 1911. Their words are carefully couched, their messages elliptical: one has to read between the lines to grasp their meaning. And Flora, who couldn't understand Russian in any case, kept them safe for over half a century. Rosalieff later enlisted in the AIF. Even ephemeral things like postcards turn up in unexpected ways, to make surprising connections.

Russians who joined the army together, or who met up at training camp, would often embark together. Six Russians from Brisbane, for instance -- the journalists Chirvin and Fedorovich, the engineer Romanovsky, the labourer Domilovsky, the former revolutionary turned cane-cutter Rosalieff, and the butcher Soolcovsky -- all ended up together in the 9th Battalion's 5th reinforcement, departing on the Kyarra on 16 April 1915, along with Korotcoff, a cane-cutter from Port Douglas.