Otto Abram Raisanen

Born 30.05.1890     Place Uleaborg (Oulu), Finland     Ethnic origin Finn     Religion Lutheran

Arrived at Australia

            from Finland     on 10.05.1915     per Port Macquarie     disembarked at Sydney

Residence before enlistment Nambour, Brisbane, Melbourne

Occupation 1916 butcher

Service

service number 367     enlisted 13.05.1916     POE Melbourne

unit 15th MG Company, 59th Battalion       rank Private

place Western Front, 1917-1919       casualties WIA 1917 (twice), 1918 (gassed)

final fate RTA 24.07.1919       discharged 16.11.1919

Naturalisation 1920

Residence after the war 1919 Yandina, Qld; 1921 Cooroy, Qld; 1931-36 New Zealand (Auckland, Fielding, North Island, Waihi, North Island), 1936 Australia; 1937 Brisbane; 1945 Yandina, NCR Qld.

Wife Ellen Yackbina Raisanen, b. Finland

Died 3.05.1962 at Nambour, Qld

Materials naturalisation (NAA)

digitised service records (NAA)

Privates MOYSEY DOSSOEFF & Otto Abram RAISANEN: Russian subjects in the Army (NAA)

From Russian Anzacs in Australian History:

An over-suspicious attitude on the part of one was often counterbalanced by commonsense from others. In August 1916 Major Hogan, from [...] machine-gun depot at Seymour, reported about Dossoeff and Raisanen, two privates in his unit who ‘are supposed to be Russian subjects … These men simultaneously asking for transfer from Machine Guns to Artillery and Light Horse struck me as being peculiar, and I thought possibly they may be Enemy Agents.’ He added, probably feeling he was making too much of it, ‘I forward this information for what it worth’. The Intelligence officer who had to deal with this ‘information’ did not seem particularly concerned about them: ‘The fact that both of them applied for a move at the same time would not mean anything as they evidently talked the matter over together and both came to the same conclusion’. The irony of this situation was that any contact between them would be highly unlikely: one, the smelter-man Moysey Dossoeff, was an Ossetian from the Caucasus; the other was a Finn, Otto Abram Raisanen, a former butcher who had enlisted just three days after his arrival in the country.

    [...] Details of the hardships experienced by these Russians working their land [after the war] sometimes turn up in archival documents where you least expect to find such information — which is how we learn of Otto Raisanen’s trials at his farm on Black Mountain Road, near Cooroy (Queensland). [...] Having been three times a casualty on the Western Front earned him the privilege of becoming an Australian and it is from his naturalisation application that we learn: ‘I lost my dwelling [by fire] and all my property … whilst burning off a felled area of scrub on my farm on October 14, 1920’. A sense of his isolation can be gleaned from another letter he wrote to explain why he hadn’t collected his service gratuity: ‘Being then in the back-blocks engaged in pioneering a farm, beset with many worries and difficulties and also not being in regular touch with the outside world at the time when Gratuity money became due, it could have escaped my knowledge’.

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