A remarkable discovery was made a few weeks ago in the Northern Territory when authorities in Katherine confirmed that a body that had lain unidentified in the town's morgue was that of Leonid Kulikovsky, a great-nephew of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.
Leonid's story began with Grand Duchess Olga, Nicholas's sister and the youngest child of Tsar Alexander III and Tsarina Marie, formerly Princess Dagmar of Denmark. In   April 1903, Olga noticed an officer of the Blue Cuirassiers in a parade in St Petersburg. It was, she said, love at first sight. The officer was Colonel Nikolai Kulikovsky, from a military family with estates in the Ukraine. Olga begged her brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, Honorary Colonel of the regiment, to effect an introduction, which he managed at lunch the next day.
Olga's marriage to Duke Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenburg was unhappy and, after two years, unconsummated, but her brother, the Tsar, and her husband refused a divorce. However, in 1906, Oldenburg appointed Kulikovsky an aide-de-camp and he came to live in their 200-room palace in St Petersburg. Finally, in 1916, the Tsar relented and granted Olga an annulment, and she wed Nikolai in   November. It was a morganatic marriage and the Empire was at war so Kulikovsky was granted no title. 
The family would soon be engulfed by revolution and by early 1917, Nicholas had abdicated and been arrested. The Kulikovskys escaped to the Crimea where their first son, Tikhon, was born.
In late 1918, they escaped to the Caucasus where Leonid's father, Guri, was born in a Cossack village in   April 1919.
On Good Friday, 1920, the family arrived safely in Denmark, joining Olga's mother, Dowager Empress Marie, and remained with her until her death in 1928, when the Kulikovskys bought Knudsminde Farm some miles out of Copenhagen. By   April 1940 and the German invasion, Tikhon and Guri, as serving officers in the Danish Army, were briefly interned as prisoners of war.
In   October 1940, Guri took a 19-year-old Danish bride, Ruth Schwarz. A daughter, Xenia, was born in 1941 and then Leonid on   May 2, 1943, the anniversary of the birth of his formidable ancestor, Catherine the Great. It is thought he was named after Father Leonid Ivanovich Kolchev, Archpriest of the Russian Church in Copenhagen and private confessor to the baby's great-grandmother, the Empress.
In 1948, the whole family emigrated to Canada. While five-year-old Leonid and his parents and sister settled in Toronto; his grandparents went to an 80-hectare farm in Campbellville, Halton County, where Olga tended the poultry, Nikolai the cattle and pigs. The vastness of Canada reminded Olga of Russia. What belongings they had filled every room of the farm house.
Leonid attended Ogden Avenue Public School in Lakeview. He had first learned Danish but, after his time in Canada, his English was much better and became his first language. He did learn Russian as a child, but never used it. He was known as "Nidki" in the family. By the time he was in Australia he had become Nick.
In 1956, on Guri and Ruth's divorce, Leonid and his brother returned to Denmark with their mother. Leonid became a boarder and completed his education at Bagsvaerd Kostskole, in Copenhagen.
By 1952 the farm work had become too much for his grandparents and they moved to a five-room house in Cooksville, in suburban Toronto. Nikolai died in 1958 - 55 years after Olga had first set eyes on him.
In 1959, on a visit to Canada, Queen Elizabeth invited Olga, her grandfather's cousin, to lunch on the Britannia. Her Cooksville neighbours were much exercised but Olga joked, "All this fuss, just to go see Lilibet and Philip!"
That year, Leonid returned to Toronto to live with his father and Guri's new wife, Aza. The following year, on   November 24, his grandmother, the last of the Grand Duchesses, died. Leonid would say that his grandmother spent much of her fortune helping Russian emigres.
On leaving school Kulikovsky followed his father and grandfather into the army; in his case, the Canadian Army, but left after nine months.
He returned to Denmark and spent time as a waiter, a doorman, and a sales assistant before deciding, in 1967, to emigrate to Australia. In Sydney he worked, at first, in a warehouse, and then joined the Sydney Water Board as a labourer. To his gang, he was the jack-hammer operator. Interviewed by the Herald in   October 1978, 11 years after he had joined the board, he was nobly philosophical about his circumstances. "If the Russian Revolution hadn't occurred, my father would have stayed in Russia and would never have met my mother, so I ... wouldn't have been born."
He said, "I have always wanted to prove myself and to get a job on my own merits. What's more," he added, "I'm a labourer. If I put on airs, I would be put down in no uncertain terms."
In 1978, he was living in Dee Why with his Tahitian girlfriend, Lindi Lou. When the writer Bill Mellor met Kulikovsky, he was dressed in Hawaiian shirt, shorts and thongs and drinking a can of beer. Mellor considered that "Nick" resembled a typical Australian contented with his lot. "As a labourer," Kulikovsky joked, "I can have a lot of freedom and do not have to use my brains too much."
Asked if the great-grandson of a tsar should be satisfied with his job, he replied, "Of course, I don't like it, but I have no choice. And you've got to laugh about it, otherwise you'd go crazy."
Kulikovsky remained with the Water Board until his retirement, when he decided to travel around the country. But when he got to Katherine his Winnebago was stolen and damaged. He traded it in for a car and decided to stay in Katherine, renting a small unit at the North Bank Caravan Park.
He lived alone but "Old Nick" was known and liked by a number of people in town. He would walk up to seven miles a day and was known as a keen reader, especially works on the Vikings.
Kulikovsky was walking with his beloved Pit Bull Cross, Rakky, when he suffered a heart attack. His body was found under a tree with Rakky beside him. A search of his mobile home revealed his mother Ruth to be his next of kin but she had died a few months earlier and it took some weeks to verify the identity of "Old Nick".
The family had tried for some time, without success, to find him - more urgently when his mother died. His funeral, with Orthodox rites, was conducted in Darwin.
The brilliantly bejewelled Dowager Empress Marie was renowned for her endlessly long pearl necklaces and would have been gratified that the Territory's richest family, the Paspaleys, and the source of some of the world's best pearls, have stepped in and offered her great-grandson a family plot to rest in - a world away from his father and grandmother in Ontario, and even further from his great uncle and aunt, Nicholas and Alexandra, and his cousins now reburied in St Petersburg.