A sparkie who lit up ASIO files as he blazed an activist trail in dark '50s
The Age
Wednesday August 26, 2009
JOHN ZAKHAROVELECTRICIAN, ACTIVIST, ARCHAEOLOGIST12-12-1924 €” 26-7-2009JOHN Zakharov, an unsung political and social activist who was under regular ASIO surveillance from the 1950s, has died at a nursing home in Avondale Heights following a series of strokes. He was 84.The former husband of the late ALP senator Olive Zakharov, he was the founding secretary of the Eltham Arts Show, and campaigned on issues from Vietnam to local kindergartens. He also helped establish the pioneering Fitzroy Legal Service, and was involved in the Gurindji strike and land rights campaign at Wattie Creek, and twice drove to the Northern Territory €” the first time with then Age columnist John Larkin €” and brought the tribal leader Vincent Lingiari to Melbourne to campaign.Born Albert Zakharoff in Glasgow, he was the son of an illiterate Latvian Jewish woman of ethnic-German background, with communist leanings. She had escaped Tsarist police with her first husband, who returned to Russia and was killed in the Russian revolution. Her second partner, John's father, on the other hand, was an opportunistic Russian ship's carpenter who had been on both sides of that conflict.One of identical twins, John grew up in a poverty-stricken family of five children. His father took little interest in the family, which may explain his own troubled personal relationships in later life, but his mother's political influence was seminal. He left school at 14 as dux, and became an apprentice electrician at the Clyde shipyards, where he soon organised a strike among apprentices.As a skilled tradesman he avoided the draft during WWII, only to enlist in 1946 €” to be with a girlfriend €” and served as a signalman in Palestine. He helped the Jewish insurgents and supplied them with radios, an act he later regretted as Israeli government human rights breaches increased. He emigrated to Australia in 1952, adopted the name John (his father's name) and worked on the Kiewa hydro scheme. Jobs followed in Melbourne and Burnie, where he met Olive Hay, later a senator. They married in 1954, but separated in the late 1960s.Throughout the 1950s and '60s he was active with the union movement, the Communist Party and then Labor Party and was a keen environmentalist. Besides being watched by ASIO, there was an attempt to have him deported as a bigamist because he'd fathered an illegitimate child before he left Britain.During the '60s he began to take an interest in the arts, which led to involvement in Eltham's fledgling arts community. He also enrolled a local 16-year-old future journalist and commentator, Phillip Adams, in the Communist Party, and continued his political activism as he attained managerial positions in the electrical industry.When he was retrenched in his 50s, John first studied law in Townsville and then completed a BA (hons) in archaeology at the ANU. He organised an expedition for several researchers to the west coast of Tasmania, to study previously unrecorded sites, and later worked as an archaeologist for the Defence Department in NSW.He is survived by five children and five grandchildren.Martin Zakharov, a Maribyrnong councillor, is John Zakharov's son.
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