Michael 'Tarzan' Fomenko (c.193017 August 2018), was an eccentric, hermetic Australian bushman who spoke to few people and spent over five decades living mainly outdoors in the rainforests of Far North Queensland, Australia. Choosing to live his life in this manner, Fomenko became well known in the area, often spotted walking or jogging at the side of the Bruce Highway to the nearest town for supplies, usually bare chested, whilst carrying his "trademark" potato sack of belongings slung over his shoulder. He was first dubbed 'Tarzan' by children he befriended whilst in the Torres Strait on a solo canoeing expedition in his 20s. He became more widely known as 'Tarzan' from the late 1950s onwards, when a number of Australian newspapers referred to him as such in their coverage of his unconventional life.
For almost 60 years, from the mid-1950s until 2012, Fomenko roamed alone in Australia's northern wilderness, mainly in the sparsely populated area between the town of Ingham and Cape York in Queensland. Fomenko would sleep under the arch of giant strangler fig tree roots, or up in the trees to avoid creatures. Although described by the Cairns Post as a "Cairns legend", few people knew Fomenko well, as he choose to share little of himself or his past with anyone except his sister Inessa, and even they were estranged for decades. Despite not knowing where her brother had been for years at a time, Inessa was content that he was all right, acknowledging to ABC News a couple of years before his death that "he had a lovely life, he lived in paradise."
When Fomenko died in 2018, the Cairns Post wrote that "an incredible piece of Queensland history has come to an end." The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that he "captured the imaginations of countless Australians, who made him into a living frontier legend." He is the subject of several books on his life, including Michael 'Tarzan' Fomenko: The Man Who Dared to Live His Own Exotic Dream in 2016, and The King of the Coral Sea: The Untold Story of an Australian Legend in 2022.
Early life Sources differ as to the year that Fomenko was born. Some sources state 1930, whereas ABC Radio notes that he was aged 86 in 2013, putting his birth year c.1927. According to ABC News, Fomenko and his sister Inessa were born in Russia (then the Soviet Union) in the 1920s, and were of aristocratic descent with their mother Princess Elizabeth Matchabelli having come from "a long line of Georgian nobility" and their father Daniel Fomenko being a Cossack. Despite the claims by some sources that Fomenko's mother had been a princess (or was a 'former' princess by the time Michael was born), author Peter Ryle discovered in the 2010s whilst researching for a book on Fomenko's life that this "supposed connection with Russian royalty" had been little more than a "family allegation" all along.
The Sydney Morning Herald notes that "Michael was born in Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, to the former Princess Elizabeth Machabelli, a member of the pre-revolution aristocracy, and one-time champion athlete Daniel Fomenko, a university lecturer."
The October Revolution, aka Bolshevik Revolution (part of the Russian Civil War), was already a decade old by the time Michael was born, and their parents' social status reportedly caused issues for the family in the political environment.
Living in Georgia, the impact of the October Revolution took time to reach the family, but by the late 1920s "things had taken a frightening turn" according to ABC News, who interviewed Inessa about the era in 2016: "There (sic) were killing their own people, a kind of cultural genocide. Father was worried that mother would be killed as well," says Inessa. "Plus, we were starving. Michael's ribs stuck out and I used to faint from lack of food. Father would hold me up by the ankles so the blood would go back to my head. Father wanted to escape, somewhere or other. He was just so worried."
Inessa recalled that as a child, Michael was "petrified of thunder and lightning", but he would choose to go outside in it, or open the window and stick his head out, in a conscious effort to embrace the fear.
Escape from the Soviet Union According to ABC News, when Michael was two-years-old, and Inessa five, the family fled on the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Soviet Union to the city of Vladivostok in the east, near Japan, using forged identification papers and wearing disguises. From there, the family paid Chinese bandits to "smuggle them across the border into Manchuria", bartering whatever items of value they had left, including jewellery which had been sewn into Inessa's toy dog for safekeeping. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the family carried out this escape in the late 1930s.
Through the expanse of the Siberian Taiga pine forest, the family travelled by foot for a month, walking at night to avoid detection, hiding during the day, and surviving off very little food. Inessa recalls "We didn't know where we were going. The Taiga is huge — snow tiger country, you know. We relied totally on these bandits. I don't know how we made it, but we did."
The family settled in China for "a few years", before relocating to Japan and the relative safety it afforded, living in the countryside around the city of Kobe, where the children found themselves "immersed in nature." By the late 1930s, Daniel Fomenko's impression of Japan as a safe country was threatened by the looming threat of war (See: Japan during World War II), and the family moved once again, this time to Sydney, Australia, in 1941.
Move to Australia Daniel Fomenko found work as a lecturer at the prestigious Sydney Church of England Grammar School, where Michael also began attending as a student. Daniel, apart from becoming one of the school's "most popular masters", was also engaged as a wartime radio commentator at this time. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Michael, "alienated by language difficulties and his refugee ordeals," felt like an outsider at the school and, according to his father, began "to see himself" as a character from Homer's Odyssey, the Greek epic of endurance and alienation. Speaking before his death in September 1960, Daniel Fomenko said "I understand Michael's quest [because] his background and experiences epitomise a great tragedy of modern life."
Inessa confirms that Michael struggled socially during this time and found it hard to fit in, which she attributed in part to the turbulent experiences of their early years: "Because we couldn't communicate our experiences as children, we were very much alone. The experiences we've had, nobody in Australia could begin to understand if we told them. There was danger, oh God, what we went through. Even though you might think he was too young, the past and all that drama really did have an effect on Michael. I think that's what got Michael into the forest, the background of our life."
On 3 December 1950, Fomenko's photograph appeared in the Sydney newspaper Truth, having competed the day prior at a shot put event at the Henson Park sports ground in the suburb of Marrickville. Michael was a natural athlete, according to ABC News, and excelled in the decathlon, "even being tipped" for the Melbourne 1956 Olympics at one point.
According to Robert Louis DeMayo, author of the 2022 historical fiction novel The King of the Coral Sea, Fomenko was "shut out" of the Commonwealth Games when he was twenty years old, however, for "financial and political reasons", an incident which led him to "question everything."
Decades later, in the 2010s, while trying to reconnect with her brother, Inessa painted him a pictured entitled "Corina, Corina", after one of his favourite songs from the 1950s. Inessa explained "I painted it to cheer him up, I thought it would remind him of those days in Sydney when we used to have sing-songs around the piano."
Canecutting in northern Queensland Upon leaving school in the mid-1950s, Fomenko took a job as a cane cutter in northern Queensland near Cairns. According to ABC News, this is when he "fell in love with the rainforest. He had found the place and the mode of living he felt most comfortable with." His decision to relocate to the jungles of Queensland was likened by the Sydney Morning Herald to the actions of the wanderer, warrior and athlete Odysseus from Homer's Odyssey.
Periodically, Fomenko would return to the family's suburban Northbridge home in Sydney before he decided to finally quit the city permanently "and lost himself in the wilds of Cape York to worship what he called the 'nature god'". Fomenko would make Northern Queensland his home for the rest of his life, with some brief visits away.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, there Fomenko "lived among Aborigines, killed crocodiles and wild boar with a machete", "grew obsessed with building and sailing dugout canoes (and) vanished like a ghost at any sign of officialdom."
Initial forays into canoeing In July 1956, The Central Queensland Herald reported that Fomenko had been the individual responsible for a "native outrigger canoe" which had been seen floating unmanned "outside Cairns harbour" some days prior. Fomenko, then 26 and described as a "bearded (..) district canecutter", had set out from the town of Deeral in the canoe on Wednesday 18 July 1956 bound for Cooktown, with a dinghy in tow. Fomenko said he had anchored his canoe on Monday night off the south side of Double Island after "having been sighted" by the Cairns Harbour Board dredge boat, Trinity Bay, and had rowed ashore (presumably to Double Island) in the dinghy, intending to return for the canoe. When he returned the next morning, the canoe had been carried off by a high tide, and Fomenko went to the police station in Mossman for help in finding it.
According to a 2011 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Fomenko was "first dubbed 'Tarzan' by children he befriended in the Torres Strait." It is known that on 6 February 1959, the Toowoomba Chronicle and Darling Downs Gazette published an article about Fomenko entitled "'Tarzan' Once Attended Top Sydney School", and on the same day, the Bundaberg News Mail also published an article about him entitled "Father Tells of "Tarzan" Son".
Journey to Dutch New Guinea In March 1959, Fomenko reportedly landed by canoe at the Lockhart River Mission, near the tip of the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, where he was "cared for by the missionaries and staff members" of the facility.
The Torres News of 17 March 1959 reported that Fomenko, then 27 (a "former Church of England school student and a son of the master of one of Sydney's most exclusive Church of England Grammar Schools") was "on his way" to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait: He left (the Lockhart River Mission) a few days ago for T.I. and anticipates the journey will take three months. The bewhiskered "Tarzan" wears a lap lap of hassian, held up with a thick leather belt to which are attached two leather sheaths holding what appears to be daggers made from old cane knives. He has no other clothes, carries no food and there is no sail to his canoe, this appears to be a hollowed out tree trunk which he carved himself. His sole effects are a couple of drums of water and some spears. Several weeks ago he met the "Wewak" and the crew gave him sugar, rice and flour. The canoe, which is about 20ft long is fitted with an out-rigger made of rough hewn boughs. His father, who thinks Michael is leading a man's life, has asked that no publicity be given to his arrival on T.I. but the eyes of the south are focused on this man who is braving the elements in this life in the raw manner.