Visiting The Future: Australian (Fellow-) Travellers in Soviet Russia

A significant number of Australian testimonies still awaiting systematic and comprehensive study bear witness to the Soviet journeys of many key figures of the Left and help to define and characterise the successive phases of the encounter between 'progressive' Australia and the USSR. The article provides a chronological survey and detailed analysis of the most significant of these accounts from the early 1920s to the late 1960s, including Katharine Susannah Prichard's The Real Russia, Frank Hardy's Journey to the Future and Manning Clark's Meeting Soviet Man. Contextualising these accounts with reference to the contemporary situation in both countries, the paper considers the impact of these perceptions of Russia on Australian political and cultural life