— Nona Pio-Ulski-Parks ~ 1947-1949

Hi Jingwu

Thank you so much for your kind words about my site! I very much appreciate it 😃

You’re quite right about me not having said anything about leaving HK and eventually coming to Australia. I’m afraid I got stuck at my KGV page and during the C-19 drama, I couldn’t get motivated to write anything and although I gave myself a goal to fix that this year, I got thoroughly sucked into listening to commentaries about the SMO in Ukraine so again have wasted a year, just about!

My parents and grandmother left HK in January 1973 and came to Perth, not Sydney. I left HK in December 1973 to spend Christmas with my parents in Perth then flew to Holland in January 1974 to help my sister out. She was having a back operation so I came to look after her two kids and also to cook dinner for my brother-in-law when he came home from work. I finally came back to Perth in August to make a new life here.

Not really sure about what the immigration policy was like here. Before 1973 anyone could come to live in Australia but they tightened things up in 1974 so the fact that I popped in at the end of 1973 meant that I was able to get a resident chop in my passport (which was a HK one, like my parents & grandmother had) and after (I think) 5 years, we could apply for an Australian citizenship. I seem to remember that my parents didn’t have access to any services by the Australian Government for 10 years so had to have enough money to look after themselves and my grandmother for that time.

To be honest, I have no idea what life here was like for those Russian refugees from China, since neither in my family nor I were in that position. My father left Shanghai in November 1937 to come to HK and my father had a contract from the HK Shanghai Hotels for him and his orchestra to play in the Peninsula, HK & Repulse Bay Hotels, and my mother, who joined him in January 1938, was manageress of Linen Chest, on Chater Road, a place which sold linen from Swatow. They managed to get my father’s mother & husband out from Tientsin into HK and looked after them until they both died in 1945.

When the Japanese invaded the Colony, because all the White Russians were stateless they were considered Third Nationals so not sent to Stanley but left to fend for themselves. My (paternal) grandmother died in June 1945 and her husband also died shortly afterwards so when the Colony was liberated, it was just my parents and my sister (who was born in 1939) left. They then managed to get my (maternal) grandmother and aunt out of Shanghai and into HK. My grandmother was a piano teacher so in the late 1940s/early I 1950s a lot of her pupils were the children of the Russian community but by the early 1960s, just about every family my parents knew left HK to go to the States, Canada & Australia.

Both my sister and I went to KGV then we both worked at the HK Bank but, since she was 8 years older than me, we didn’t mix in the same circles 😂

So, as you can see, my family didn’t mix with Russian families in Sydney – no, I lie! The Vargassoffs, who lived in the apartment below ours in Morrison Hill Road, left HK for Sydney and they bought a lovely house in Castle Cove. Seva Vargassoff was a doctor, his wife Tanya was a stay-at-home mother, and I believe he had retired so didn’t work after HK. Their son, Nick, also became a doctor and worked in Sydney but Vera, the eldest child, went to university and then went to London to work. We visited Tanya, her mother, and Nick when my parents and I were on leave in Australia in 1969.

In China, although my father, his mother and siblings first went to Harbin after leaving Vladivostok during the Civil War, they didn’t stay there long so didn’t get to know the Russian community there so would not have known many of the Russians who ended up in Sydney. They certainly didn’t know any of the Russians from Xinjiang 😞

Are you on Facebook? Why I ask is because I stated a FB group called White Russian Emigres from China and quite a few members live on the East Coast, including Sydney, and just a couple of years ago we had an influx of members who were, in fact, from Xinjiang! If you’d like to join the group, you can ask that those that have more knowledge about what you asked me and hopefully you’ll get good answers to help you with your documentary. I found it too difficult time-wise to be the group’s administrator but am more than happy to introduce you to the members!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/WhiteRussianEmigresFromChina

Hope that’s been of some help to you 😊

Cheers

~Nona

Hi Ian
I’ve sent Anne’s email address to you by email so please let me know if you don’t get it!
Cheers
Nona