This expertise and her distinctive treatment of life in the Soviet Union, eschewing Cold War polemics, took Fitzpatrick to a distinguished career in the United States. She revisited Australia from time to time, but showed no interest in working on its history until the early years of this century as she approached retirement. A munificent award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made it possible to invite her former doctoral students, along with those of her friend Katerina Clark, to a major symposium, a treat for the local students who attended. Alongside that gathering were two shorter conferences, one on Australian visitors to the Soviet Union and the other on these two women’s fathers, Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark.

Sheila’s contributions to both conferences were indicative of a burgeoning interest in Australian interactions with the USSR, informed by an unmatched knowledge of the Soviet perspective. Her return to Australia in 2012 enabled her to initiate a major research project on the Russians displaced by World War II who settled in Australia. Previous historians have recognised the importance of this country’s Displaced Persons scheme, which brought some 170,000 people from European refugee camps between 1947 and 1952. They relieved crippling labour shortages that were paralysing the country’s postwar reconstruction plans at a time when a lack of shipping made it impossible to transport the 100,000 Britons who had lodged their applications to migrate. A further advantage of the DPs was that they could be directed to work for two years where most needed – that is, to uncongenial jobs the locals would not take.

Early accounts of our Displaced Persons scheme were parochial. We did not appreciate that the International Relief Organization (IRO) that ran it, while working under the auspices of the United Nations, was serving the Cold War objectives of the United States. The IRO took over the functions of the earlier United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, which had established some 800 camps to accommodate survivors of the war rendered stateless by the boundary and regime changes it caused. From the beginning it was bound by an agreement – made by Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta in February 1945 – that the victorious Allies would repatriate each other’s citizens. This applied to prisoners of war liberated by their armed forces and to the several million Soviet subjects who had been conscripted to work as labourers in Germany.

Most sent back to the USSR under this arrangement went with extreme reluctance, some because they had thrown in their lot with the Nazi regime, others because Stalin’s hostility to returnees was notorious – even the prisoners of war were treated as traitors. Any cooperation ended as the Cold War took hold – hence the changed purpose for which the IRO was created, no longer relief and rehabilitation of the victims of war in their countries of origin but resettlement outside Europe.

Even then, Soviet citizens were not eligible for resettlement. Yet by Fitzpatrick’s reckoning some 20,000 came here as DPs, and then another 5,000 in the second half of the 1950s on a similar basis. This is one of the most startling of her revelations, partly explained by the fact that nearly all had assumed another nationality. As Jayne Persian’s book Beautiful Balts (2017), another fruit of this research project, makes clear, Arthur Calwell, as minister of immigration in the Chifley government, was acutely conscious this was Australia’s first venture into large-scale, non-British migration. Indeed, it was a forerunner of the schemes that would follow, whereby foreign nationals were chosen for their suitability and inducted into Australia by government sponsorship and under close supervision. Hence the first DPs were Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, since they were considered less likely to offend local susceptibilities than the Slavs who followed.

Equally startling is the remarkable variety of these Soviet newcomers. Not all were Russians, for they included Cossacks and various Muslim nationalities of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (who clearly breached the ban on Asian immigrants). A number were strictly refugees rather than displaced persons, since they had left Russia much earlier to escape persecution by the tsarist regime or as supporters of that regime when it was overthrown. While the White Russians caused little Australian concern, those who fled pogroms before 1917 or escaped the descent of the Stalinist regime into anti-Semitism were regarded with suspicion. Although Calwell sympathised with Jewish refugees, he imposed strict limits on their entry for fear of provoking the marked prejudice of so many Australians. Besides, Australian security agencies were determined to prevent the entry of any potential fifth column, and Jews had a reputation for left-wing sympathies. In fact, very few of those who came from the holding camps in Europe were attracted to the left, easing concerns about the substantial Jewish component of the 5,000 Russians living in China who were admitted in the 1950s.

Fitzpatrick offers an intriguing guide to this complex mosaic of ‘Russians’ who arrived from Europe and China, to the causes of their displacement, and to the circumstances that brought them here. With particular subtlety, she explores the life they made in Australia. Having assumed different nationalities to gain admission, they were inhibited from open discussion of their past experience, yet even on the voyage out were denouncing each other as Soviet agents or war criminals. Security agents in the Soviet Embassy tried, with little success, to persuade these ‘stolen citizens’ to return home, while extreme anti-communists continued to plan the liberation of their homeland. As Fitzpatrick shows, the Orthodox Church played an important role in community life, though it was split between clergy who maintained relations with the primate in Moscow and others who refused any relationship. And insofar as the Church sustained a Russian way of life, Jewish Russians preferred the company of coreligionists to compatriots.

White Russians, Red Peril draws on a large body of oral testimony to illustrate these patterns and a wide range of archival sources to document them. It exhibits all the author’s qualities: close attention to the evidence, a sure grasp of context, and a clear-eyed appraisal of heavily contested ground. The members of this gifted historical family – Brian, Sheila, and her late brother, David – were or are superb writers. Not for Sheila, however, her father’s declamatory flights of rhetoric. Her prose is in a lower key, never forced, playing over this complex and often painful subject with great effect.