POPOV AND THE LOST CONSTRUCTIVISTS
In 1919 Brisbane was the location of what have become known as the Red Flag Riots, street battles in South Brisbane between Russian émigrés, and others of a leftist political persuasion, and loyalist bands of returned servicemen.1 In the years after the first failed revolution in Russia in 1905, Queensland became the destination for several thousand Russian refugees fleeing Tsarist persecution. After 1917, the community began to shrink as many returned to Russia to be part of the Soviet project. This original left-wing community, however, was slowly replaced or overwritten by their political opposites: waves of White Russians, now fleeing Communist rule, arrived in Queensland from the Far East.
Brisbane’s substantial Russian connection seems to be a strange sidebar of Australian history. It evokes scattered images and ideas: Lenin’s treatise on why Queensland’s labour movement was a bourgeois distraction from the main game of Communist uprising, samovars for sale in South Brisbane markets, the ex-Prime Minister of Russia, Alexander Kerensky sitting on a veranda in the Brisbane suburb of Clayfield as his Brisbane-born wife lay dying in 1945, a Russian Orthodox priest locked up for condemning Stalin during World War II. These are moments largely viewed as irrelevant and trivial to the business of Australian history. Historical footnotes and sidebars, however, seem to be where the interesting moments of Australian history take place and each one of these episodes has its own fascinating material culture.
Robert MacPherson is an artist who has specialised in reframing and drawing attention to the incidental material evidence of our culture, from his early abstractions and his Frog Poem installations to the Mayfair series. Possibly MacPherson’s best known work, Mayfair: (Swamp rats) Ninety-seven signs... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline