This innovative historical biography tracks the lives of a unique Australian Aboriginal family whose Russian ancestry can be traced to the ancient Russian czars, while their Aboriginal ancestors are descended from the chiefs of the Ngadjandji people of the Atherton Tablelands. At the center of the book are two lives: that of Nicholas Illin, a Russian intellectual obsessed with ideas but constantly failing in life, and that of his son Leandro, who put his father's ideas into practice when in 1915 he married an Aboriginal woman, Kitty Clarke, and after her death raised their six children in outback Queensland.The text combines narrative history, imaginative reconstruction, and the author's own story of interviewing descendants of the Illins and searching for documentary evidence. It follows the Illins from Russia to Europe, North America, South America, and ultimately Australia.