Disasters attract crowds. They break down barriers too, although usually only fleetingly. There's nothing like a catastrophe — a fire in the warehouse at the end of your street, say — to bring the neighbours out in their pyjamas. People who would never acknowledge each other by day start sharing stories in the flashing lights of the fire engines. Hopefully nobody dies, of course. The danger past, everyone goes back to bed. And next morning? A small wave to the person next door on your way to work, perhaps; then a week later, nothing.
The global financial crisis has had a similar effect on world leaders. G8; G20; loads of important people, all with something in common to talk about! But how many of these relationships will last beyond the crisis and past the usual diplomatic pledges to 'learn from our mistakes and build closer bonds'?
Russia is one of the countries that Australia has been bumping into at these crisis meetings.
Russia is one of the 'BRIC economies' (Brazil, Russia, India and China) which are heralded as the emerging economic heavyweights. As such it isn't hard to imagine frantic requests heading backwards and forwards to and from our Prime Minister's office and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as advisers scrounge for interesting angles, to be deployed by Kevin Rudd as an icebreaker at his next meeting with Dmitry Medvedyev.
If you were sitting in a Sydney skyscraper, looking out over the harbour, chewing a pen, trying to think of some precedent for Australia's connection with distant Russia, you would have the answer sitting in front of you. At the northern foot of the Sydney Harbour Bridge is Kirribilli Point. But for most of Australia's white settlement, it has been known as Russian Point, for it was here that the first Russian ship, the Neva, dropped anchor in 1807, received with fireworks, friendship and a gala ball by Governor Bligh.
In the first century or so following that meeting, Russians developed a keen interest in Australia and her way of life, variously describing it as a 'working man's paradise', a 'key trading partner for the future', a leader in farming that could help Russia restructure her agriculture, and a land of egalitarian people even more sports-mad than the British: a sunny place 'where every farm has a tennis court'.
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