And now, one of the last links to the legendary Ballets Russes, Anna Volkova, has died in Sydney aged 96.

While her ballet name was Anna Volkova, many locals knew her as Ania Barnes. Boorowa local, Pip Merriman attended the funeral recently. 

“My Mum and I went to Ania Barnes’ funeral on Friday, she was such a lovely woman and she and Mum were good friends,” she said. 

“Jim and Ania Barnes lived at Suffolk Vale, and my parents loved going there for parties; also Anna McGuiness, Pam and Donna Kelly were at the funeral as they went to Ania for ballet classes in Boorowa.”

Volkova danced with the Ballets Russes from the age of 16, at the peak of the troupe’s fame, performing at London’s Covent Garden, as well as in other major cities.

Born in Russia in 1917, she moved with her family to Paris during the Communist Revolution, and began dancing at a Parisian studio run by two former Imperial Russian ballerinas.

Although she took to dancing at the relatively late age of 12, the teachers were so impressed with her technique they taught her for free.

However, her father was strict and believed in education, insisting she finish her studies before following her dancing dream.

By the time she was 16, she had caught the attention of Colonel Wassily de Basil, who was looking for dancers for his company, an offshoot of the original Ballets Russes.

He offered her a place with the company for the summer and although her father prevented her from travelling to America to dance, she continued training in Paris.

Volkova did eventually join the company permanently in 1933, dancing at dozens of venues worldwide. Speaking at the National Library in 2009, she maintained that Covent Garden was her favourite.

Volkova met her future husband as the company boarded a ship in Fremantle for the long trip back home to England. Jim Barnes was a member of a rowing crew bound for Henley to compete.

The two courted in London while the company was dancing another stint at Covent Garden, although they put off their engagement as the war was looming.

It would be six years before they met again; the Ballets Russes stayed in Paris, before sailing to South America, where they spent the bulk of the war performing in Chile, Peru, Argentina and Brazil.

During this time, Volkova was stranded in Cuba during the infamous Ballets Russes strike, which she said was one of the few unpleasant memories she had of her dancing career.

She and Barnes met up again in Sydney after the war, and she made the difficult decision to stop dancing altogether when she got married.

At 26, she wanted to start a family, and she knew from the experience of other dancers that she would not have been able to do both. 

‘’At that stage and at that time, it would have been impossible,’’ she said.

The couple lived in Sydney and had two boys before Barnes decided he wanted to rejoin his farming family in country NSW and live on the land.

‘’I didn’t know a thing about country life, especially not in Australia.’’ she recalled. 

‘’I didn’t even know the word ‘jackaroo’.’’

Whilst she was appalled the first time she saw a sheep being shorn, she eventually fell in love with the land at Boorowa, and the couple stayed on the farm for 26 years.

‘’Life was very rough, and you had to be tough. It was a completely separate life from the Australia I had expected,’’ she said.

And while she had many fond memories of dancing with the Ballets Russes, she never forgot the anxiety of working alongside the company’s legendary ‘’Baby Ballerinas’’, the three young stars who overshadowed all the other dancers.

“We were in a way ‘friendly enemies’, like a large family. We disliked each other, but at the same time felt secure in numbers,” she said. 

Although she didn’t dance again, she ran dance classes for children for two years. She was always surprised, later in the life, that people still cared about the Ballets Russes, as very few of the original dancers were still alive.

Volkova moved back to Sydney, following Jim’s death in 2003.The Australian Ballet rediscovered her and she had been a star mentor for them ever since. 

Anna Volkova died in a retirement village on Sydney’s northern beaches on Sunday August, 18.