When Ukrainian woman Liliana Gasinskaya squeezed through the port hole of a Russian ship wearing only a red bikini in 1979, she splashed right into Sydney Harbour and world headlines. Dubbed the “Red Bikini Girl”, her bid to defect from the Soviet Union fuelled a Sydney newspaper war and a debate about queue-jumping refugees, as well as plunging her into the treacherous waters of red bikini russian defector celebrity. The 18-year-old had been working as a waitress on board the Russian cruise liner Leonid Sobinov when she made her dramatic swim for freedom in January 1979. Emerging from the harbour at Pyrmont, she asked a man walking his dog for clothes and assistance in broken English.
Russian consular officials were reportedly soon on her trail but the Daily Mirror newspaper tracked her down first and promptly whisked her away to a secret hideout to trump their rivals with a series of exclusive interviews and bikini pose photos. Such was the fierce competition for the story of the Red Bikini Girl that Mirror staff at one stage draped the head of a female cadet reporter and had a Russian translator field media questions to the decoy to foil their opposition and keep their prized exclusive. The young defector revealed she had joined the Russian ship’s crew as part of a planned bid to escape her homeland. The press revelled in her declarations of how she thought Australia was beautiful after seeing photos of it in a magazine but she hated Russia and its communist system.
15,000 to become a nude centrefold for the very first Australian edition of Penthouse magazine. In Russia, we don’t do these things or anything that could be considered sexy,” she said at the time. Not unlike today’s reality show contestants who find instant fame, she announced she wanted to be an actress, had a beauty makeover before the cameras and enrolled in a modelling school. Despite her unspecified claims of repression which one commentator sneered may have been “the shops in Russia are boring”, she was allowed to stay. This sparked an outcry that refugees of conflicts in Asia with greater fears of persecution were not extended the same hasty welcome.
The Liberal Government was accused of “sensational cheesecake immigration” with Opposition backbencher Ben Humphreys speculating that eligibity for immigration to Australia depended on a candidate’s media appeal and how they shaped up in a bikini. Others were more supportive, with one newspaper commentator opining “without being sexist I would say that being young and nubile makes her a desirable immigrant for the simple social reason that our past immigration programs have left us with a surplus of young, single men”. It wasn’t a young, single man that Liliana fell for but a married Daily Mirror photographer with three children who left his family for her. Under his management, she embarked on a new career path as a professional disco dancer and DJ and made appearances on TV shows “Young Doctors” and “Arcade”.
