Povilas Niaura (1919-2006): A Settled Settler, by Ann Tündern-Smith

Updated 2 January 2024. 

Povilas Niaura recovered enough from the terrors of the war in Lithuania and Germany to settle happily in Tasmania. Sent to work at Goliath Portland Cement Co Ltd in Railton, he stayed with the company for the remainder of his working days. The company lent him and other workers a brick-making machine to build their own homes, so clearly the company was one which looked after its employees when they were loyal in return.

Povilas reached Railton on 28 April 1948 with 19 others from the First Transport, the General Stuart Heintzelman, exactly 5 months after reaching Australia. The group contained 13 Lithuanians, 4 Latvians and 3 Estonians. They had been sent to Victoria to pick fruit first.

The addition of these 20 men to the workforce of the main local industry was so important that the town put on a gala welcome for them.

Povilas Niaura in 1947, aged 26

Source:  NAA, A2571, Niaura, Povilas

Goliath Portland Cement is the reason for the continued existence of the town of Railton, although this also is a service centre for the surrounding agricultural and forestry community. It is only 23 Km south of the city of Devonport, on Tasmania’s north coast. Goliath took over the smaller Tasmanian Cement Pty Ltd in 1928, leading to Railton’s prosperity.

The new arrivals were accommodated in what Ramunas Tarvydas calls ‘the single men’s camp’. He adds, ‘At first the accommodation was shared, but soon the company built new huts for all the men. The huts had timber framing and were clad in their own “fibro” sheets. Inside was a folding iron bed, mattress and a couple of blankets. The company gave the men timber to make their own furniture, but no tools; eventually they relented on that point.’

Sixteen of the 17 Latvians and Lithuanians are in this photo,
perhaps taken by the seventeenth;
Povilas is the tallest man standing on the right

Source: Tarvydas, From Amber Coast ...

Tarvydas continues, ‘At first most of the Balts worked either in the factory or in the quarry, where the pay was five shillings per week more but the work harder. One of the more hazardous jobs, in hindsight, was making the asbestos-cement products, although [researching in the mid-1990s] no Balt seems to have suffered any long-term effects.’

The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) has said that, ‘Goliath made everything from asbestos sheeting to a giant asbestos fairy penguin in its factory from 1947 to 1986’. Tarvydas adds that the company made ‘corrugated roofing, guttering, fascias, vats, etc.’

In the Railton district, Povilas met Margaret Jean, married and had two children, Stephen and Denise. Their cemetery plaques indicate that grandchildren too. Until 1948, the Niaura family name was not to be found in Tasmania. Now there are 8 adults in the family as well as great grandchildren.

Povilas, or Paul, the English equivalent of his Lithuanian name, worked for Goliath Cement for 36 years. He retired in 1984 at the age of 65. Despite attending English language lessons in the Bonegilla Camp and perhaps trying again with the lessons broadcast by the ABC, he never managed to read and write the language. 

This lack of fluent English limited his rise to more senior positions in the Company, but it did not stop it from trusting him to be sent to installation jobs.  They were a great improvement on his initial task, operating a jack hammer in the limestone quarry.

The most memorable of the roofing jobs was on a grandstand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, in preparation for the 1956 Olympic Games.  There were times when he was away for weeks at a time, more often away than he was at home.

Son Stephen now has spent nearly as long with Goliath Cement as his father did. Stephen has clocked up 32 years. He now is a control room operator for the company, supervising from mining the limestone to the end products. His younger sister works with the Tasmanian Government-owned company which runs the ferries to and from Devenport in Tasmania, across Bass Strait to Geelong in Victoria.

One of the 6 grandchildren, Jason is a Pilates instructor and graphic designer, originally a hairdresser. Another, Bradley, is a former carpenter who is now regional manager of Fairbrother, a commercial and industrial construction, joinery and facilities management company operating in Tasmania and regional Victoria. The others are, respectively, James, another carpenter, Danielle, a school teacher, Katrina, a real estate agent and Rachel, a nurse. All contribute significantly to their local communities, to Tasmania and to Australia.

Paul was born to a farming family in Anykščiai, Lithuania, on 4 September 1919. His mother died when he was young so his father remarried. Along with Elžbieta (Elizabeth), his one full sister, he found himself living with something like 6 step-sisters and step-brothers.

Growing up on a farm, his skills were utilised by the Germans when they occupied Lithuania between the summers of 1941 and 1944. He was nearing 25 years old when the Soviet forces started their return. His oldest step-sister told him that he should run or else he would be shot by the Soviets. He took this advice. Like others exposed to a year of Communism under the Soviet rule in 1940-41, he would have wanted to get out. He could, as his food-production abilities would have led to the Germans to want to take him on their retreat.

He loved the farming life, so saved before marriage to buy 5 acres in Railton, where he built his house with Goliath’s brick-making machine. At first he rented out the house while continuing to live in the single men’s quarters. After he and Margaret Jean met and married, the 5 acres provided a semi-rural home for them and the two children.

The house that Paul built
with cement bricks courtesy of Goliath Portland Cement and its brick-making machine

Source: Stephen Niaura

The family had its own dairy cow and geese. Paul loved his geese. Regardless, they would be fattened and sold for the Christmas feasting of others. Every so often, the surplus milk could be churned into butter, which could be bartered for groceries at the local store. Paul’s son, Stephen, still keeps geese on the Railton land.

Stephen Niaura's geese

Source:  Stephen Niaura

The barn that Paul built to store feed for his animals on the 5 acres

Source: Stephen Niaura

Paul's cowshed, with the bail for milking the house cow on the left;
now a home for chickens

Source: Stephen Niaura

After the children were born, Paul still had enough money to buy 50 acres at Sunnyside, less than 10 minutes’ drive southeast of Railton. He raised beef cattle there, with help from Stephen when he was old enough.

Paul became an Australian citizen in August 1959.

When Lithuania’s impending independence became obvious again from the late 1980s, Paul wished that he could go back to see his remaining family. The question of cost arose, so he was urged to sell the 50 acres to raise the money. Having done this, however reluctantly, he spent some weeks in his homeland.

Before he returned to Australia, the family gathered to tell him that part of the land which had been restored to them by the Lithuanian Government was his. He assured them that he was handing it back to them to use as they saw fit.

Denise and her daughter have also been able to spend time in Lithuania visiting relatives. Neither had learnt much of Paul’s language from him, but they stayed with a great nephew of Paul’s, a Lithuanian who spoke English, having visited the United States and United Kingdom.

The house Paul built in Railton is still in the family though the 5 acres decreased when some had to be sold to pay for the cost of connecting to the town’s new sewerage system.

Paul Niaura in December 1997, at a reunion of Tasmanian 'First Swallows',
the name Lithuanian passengers from the First Transport gave themselves

Source: Hobart Mercury, 2 December 1997

If Paul had developed any signs of mesothelioma from his work with asbestos, it would have cut short what became an extremely long life. He was 87 years old when he died on 18 November 2006. He was buried in the Mersey Vale Memorial Park in Quoiba, a southern suburb of Devonport.

Grave Marker for Paul Niaura

Source: FindAGrave.com

Paul’s early plans to buy land for farming led to Aussie drinking mates christening him ‘Cocky’. The School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University thinks that this nickname arose in the 1870s, as an abbreviation of cockatoo farmer. Back then, it was a disparaging term for small-scale farmers, probably because of a habit of using a small area of land for a short time and then moving on, like cockatoos feeding.

‘Cocky’ stuck with Paul to his memorial plaque. This features his geese, though, looking especially pampered, rather than cockatoos. The Cocky nickname has transferred to his son Stephen, who initially was ‘Cocky Junior’.

Margaret Jean lies besides him. She was only 73 years old when she died less than 3 years after him. This means that there was a 16-year age gap when she married the tall (5 feet 10 inches or 178 cm on one form and 6 feet 1 inch or 185 on another) and handsome foreigner in the 1950s.

Grave marker for Margaret Niaura

Source: FindAGrave.com

I thank Stephen and Denise Niaura for their assistance with this biography.

Sources

Australian Broadcasting Commission, ‘New factory owner managing asbestos tragedy’, ABC News, 8-12 May 2010, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-05-08/new-factory-owner-managing-asbestos-tragedy/427088, accessed 21 January 2023.

‘Certificates of Naturalization’, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 26 November 1959, p 4167, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article240887808, accessed through Trove, 20 March 2023.

'Fairbrother', https://www.fairbrother.com.au/, accessed 2 January 2024.

'Meanings and origins of Australian words and idioms, C', School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences, https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/meanings-origins/c#:~:text=Cocky, accessed 2 April 2023.

National Archives of Australia: Migrant Reception and Training Centre, Bonegilla; A2571, Name Index Cards, Migrants Registration [Bonegilla], 1947-1956; NIAURA, Povilas : Year of Birth - 1919 : Nationality - LITHUANIAN : Travelled per - GEN. HEINTZELMAN : Number – 795, https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=203689468, accessed 2 April 2023.

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Tasmanian Branch; P1184, Registration papers for non-British migrants, lexicographical series, 1949 - circa 1966; Niaura P, https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=1777815, accessed 2 April 2023.

Niaura, Denise, personal communications, March 2023.

Niaura, Stephen, personal communications, February-March 2023 and January 2024.

‘Paul “Cocky” Niaura’, Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/234461136/paul-niaura/photo, accessed 2 January 2024.

‘People whose last name is NIAURA’, LocateFamily.com, https://www.locatefamily.com/N/NIA/NIAURA-1.html, accessed 21 January 2023.

‘Railton: Quiet country town south of Devonport’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 February 2004, https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/railton-20040208-gdkqow.html, accessed 21 January 2023.

Rimon, Wendy, ‘Goliath Cement’ in The Companion to Tasmanian History, 2006, https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/G/Goliath%20Cement.htm, accessed 21 January 2023.

Tarvydas, Ramunas, From Amber Coast to Apple Isle: Fifty Years of Baltic Immigrants in Tasmania 1948-1998, Baltic Semicentennial Commemoration Activities Organising Committee, Hobart, pp 46-8.

Whitfield, Meg, ‘Railton firie recognised for more than 30 years service’, The Advocate, (Burnie, Tasmania), 25 May 2021. Also https://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/7266622/railton-firie-recognised-for-more-than-30-years-service/?cs=3674, accessed 26 February 2023.

Wikipedia, ‘Lithuania Independence Restoration Day’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuania_Independence_Restoration_Day, accessed 27 February 2023.

Viktoras Kuciauskas (1929-2008): Not All Stayed, by Ann Tündern-Smith

Updated 5 December 2023.

A small number of the First Transporters moved to third countries after their initial settlement in Australia.  Broadly, their reasons for leaving were reunion with family who had settled successfully elsewhere or being able to practise their professions when this was denied to them without "retraining" in Australia.

One who left was Viktoras Kuciauskas.  He stayed in Australia long enough to obtain citizenship here in 1953.  He was the only recipient of citizenship at his ceremony in Burnie, Tasmania, on 17 July, but the event was seen as so important that he had to listen politely to at least 6 speeches.  He was surrounded by around 20 very important people, according to the local newspaper.

In 1954, the Burnie Advocate newspaper carried a photograph of him as the radiographer in charge of a mobile X-ray unit (part of the then national campaign against tuberculosis).  A short article in the local Lithuanian newspaper, Mūsų Pastogė, reports that he was deputy chairman of the Lithuanian community in Hobart in early 1956 as well as the rapporteur for its audit committee.  

Victor Kuciauskas as radiographer in charge of a mobile Xray unit
in Burnie, Tasmania, October 1954

Source: Burnie Advocate, 20 October 1954

Yet only one year later, he was entering the United States via Canada, to reside there for the rest of his life.  

Born in Marijampolė County on 8 April 1929, he was only 18 when he arrived in Australia.  This age makes it unlikely that he had qualified as a radiographer already, but perhaps he had undertaken some relevant studies which made qualifying here easier.  His Bonegilla card records his English as 'fair':  it must have quickly become good enough for him to complete technical studies successfully maybe less than 5 years later.

Bonegilla card for Viktoras Kuciauskas

Source:  NAA

The Bonegilla card shows that he stayed in the camp until 28 January 1948, so he had nearly 2 months there to attend English classes and improve his language skills.  On 28 January, he and others were sent to HE Pickworth in Ardmona in Victoria to pick fruit.  He spent more than 2 months there, returning to the camp at the end of the fruit-picking on 1 March.  Only 4 days later, on 5 March, he was part of a group sent as labourers to the Electrolytic Zinc Company in Rosebery, Tasmania.

Viktoras Kuciauskas is third from the left in the front row in this photograph
taken at the burial of Aleksandras Vasilauskas in Albury's Pioneer Cemetery, 5 January 1948

Source: Collection of Endrius Jankus

Rosebery was the site of the Electrolytic Zinc Company's mine.  Mining is skilled work, so it is unlikely that the group of recent arrivals sent from Bonegilla were employed to do that.  The general labouring that they probably did still would have been very hard work, especially for young men who had been not particularly well fed during their 3 years in Germany.  Viktoras and the others would have been very relieved when notified in September 1949 that they were no longer required to work in Australia.  They had been free to leave their employers at any time so long as they sought the assistance of the Commonwealth Employment Service to find 'other work as directed', but the 2 years of employment in Australia often got interpreted as 2 years with only one employer.

Records digitised by Ancestry.com show that Viktoras travelled to the United States in 1955. He was on the RMS Orion, an Orient Line ship which berthed in San Francisco on 18 April 1955. By this time, his father was living in the US, in New York, while his mother was somewhat closer to San Francisco, in Omaha, Nebraska. His daughter, Victoria Siliunas, has advised that while visiting his mother, he went on a blind date with the woman who was to become his wife. 

His application for US citizenship shows that he arrived in the US again on 7 February 1957. This time, he had travelled from Sydney to Vancouver on another Orient Line ship, the SS Oronsay. His date of arrival in Vancouver is not yet public, but he reached Honolulu en route on 30 July 1956. 

Modern cruise ships take 9 to 13 days to travel from Honolulu to Vancouver, so Viktoras probably arrived in Vancouver before the end of August 1956. Between September and January 1957, did he stay in Vancouver with his sister, Stase, or did he drop into the US on visits to the special new woman in his life? If those records have been kept, they are not yet public. 

Less than one year after his second arrival, on 25 January 1958, he married Regina Parulis (Parulyte in Lithuanian), who had been born in Tauragė, Lithuania. By the time of the citizenship application they had a son, born in December 1959, and were to have another child, their daughter Victoria.

Based on decades of prior experience as a country of mass immigration, the US naturalization application form provided for applicants to change their name at this point in their lives.  Viktoras made use of this opportunity:  henceforward, he wished to be known as Victor Kucas.  

Victor's occupation is recorded as 'X-ray' on the application form.  An obituary written by a friend since school days, Edvardas Šulaitis, says that Victor obtained an additional nuclear medicine technician's qualification in the US.  Victor became the head radiographer in the Frank Cuneo Memorial Hospital, Chicago, for the more than 30 years that this hospital operated from 1957.

Ancestry.com has collected some information about Victor Kucas' life in the United States, mainly in the form of addresses from 1996 onwards.  They reveal that he was living in Lockport, Illinois, a city some 50 Km southwest of Chicago.

More is revealed in the Šulaitis obituary, published in Draugas, a Chicago-based newspaper which has been the only Lithuanian-language daily published outside Lithuania.  Having been a scout in childhood, Victor led the Lithuanian scout troop Lituanicas in Chicago and, during 1960-1963, was a member of the Council of the Lithuanian Scouts Union.  He edited the children's magazine, Eglutė, during 1994-2003, and for six years edited the Pasaulio lietuvio magazine.  He was active in a number of other organisations.

Edvardas Šulaitis described his friend as 'hard-working, calm-mannered' and added that 'Viktor remained in my memory as a quiet but accomplished person who paid tribute not only to his family, but also to the entire Lithuanian community.'

A portrait of Victor in later life on display at his funeral

Source:  Draugas

Sadly, Victor's life had ended in 7 months of pain after an accident in his home in December 2007.  He died on 17 July 2008, aged 79 years old, but he did live long enough to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary earlier that year.  His ashes were buried in a Chicago cemetery under the names of both Kuciauskas and Kucas.

Victor Kucas is buried with his father and wife in the St Casimir Catholic Cemetery,
Chicago, Illinois

Source:  FindaGrave

His wife, Regina, born on 24 January 1929, died 7 years later on 9 December 2015, aged 86.  She is buried with Victor.

The original burial in this plot would have been that of Pranas Kuciauskas, Victor's father.  His name appears on a nominal roll of Displaced Persons Departing From Resettlement Repatriation and US Migration Center Butzbach on 6 May 1949, held by the Arolsen Archives.  The Archives also have digitised a record which shows that Pranas was in Hanau, Germany, with his two children.  Why then did the three of them settle in three different countries?  Was the absence of any next of kin on Victor's Bonegilla card an oversight, or was it deliberate?

Others who asked the selection team for the First Transport if their relatives could come too were assured that they could follow.  In at least one instance that I am aware of, the relative came on the Second Transport.  Why was Victor not declaring that he had family and arranging for them to join him in Australia?

Pranas at the time of his migration to the US was aged 52, his occupation was given as Caretaker and his marital status was signified with a D, presumably for Divorced.  Somehow he was travelling independently when everyone else on his page of the nominal roll had a sponsoring organisation.  He was headed for Henry Street in Kings Park, Suffolk County, on New York State's Long Island.  Who did he know there?

Born on 4 June 1897, Pranas died on 1 October 1962 aged 65.  He died in Cook County, Illinois, so he was living with or near his son in Lockport.

The simple answer to many of the questions raised above might be that the young Victor was as adventurous as any other 18-year-old, maybe even more so given his scouting background.  When he heard about the possibility of moving to Australia, it may have seemed also like a quick way out of the previous 7 years of war and deprivation. 

Viktoras Kuciauskas is third from the left in the front row of this 1944 photo
of the fifth form students of the Kybartai Gymnasium in Lithuania

Source:  Collection of Edvardas Šulaitis via Draugas

If there were other young people from the same refugee camp answering Australia's call, that would have added to the pull factor.

Victor clearly did well in Australia.  It's likely, however, that he realised that he needed Australian citizenship for the passport to travel to reconnect with family members who had resettled in North America.  He must have been earning enough money through his responsible job in Australia to make not one, but two trips to North America. 

Returning to the US was a wise personal decision for Victor, not only for marriage and children but he was able to achieve more qualifications and a job which probably gave give security and satisfaction for the rest of his working life.  His move was Australia's loss, though.

I thank Jonas Mockunas for drawing attention to Edvardas Šulaitis' Draugas obituary, which has filled in gaps in Victor's life in the US.

Sources

'Documents from AIDUKAS, ADOLFAS, born on May 20th, 1895, born in LAUCIUNISKE and from other persons', Arolsen Archives, DocID 78869128, https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/de/document/78869128.

'Draugas' (1 February 2023), in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugas, accessed 8 April 2023.

'Hobartas, Nauja apylinkės valdyba' (Hobart, New community board), Musu Pastogė, (Sydney, NSW), 8 February 1956, p 4, via Trove, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article259359765, accessed 31 March 2023.

Jankus, Endrius, personal communication, 25 September 2009.

'Migrant Culture Praised at Naturalisation Ceremony', Advocate (Burnie, Tas),  18 July 1953, p 6, via Trove,  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article69481268, accessed 25 March 2023.   

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A2571, Name Index Cards, Migrants Registration; Kuciauskas, Viktoras: Year of Birth - 1929: Nationality - LITHUANIAN: Travelled per - GEN. HEINTZELMAN: Number – 941; accessed 27 March 2023. 

'Naturalisation ceremony at Burnie on Friday ... ',  Advocate (Burnie, Tas), 20 July 1953, p 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article69481365, accessed 25 March 2023.   

[Pranas Kuciauskas], Arolsen Archives, Document ID: 81711918, Correspondence and nominal roles [sic], done at Butzbach: means of transport train, plane; Transit countries and emigration destinations: Australia, Italy, Canada, USA, https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/de/document/81711918.

Pranas Kuciauskas, in Cook County, Illinois, Death Index, 1908-1988, Ancestry.com, accessed 31 March 2023.

'Pranas Kuciauskas', Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/239782705/pranas-kuciauskas, accessed 25 March 2023.

'Regina T. Parulis Kucas', Petkus & Son Funeral Homes (Lemont, Illinois), [December 2015], https://www.petkusfuneralhomes.com/obituaries/Regina-T-Parulis-Kucas?obId=2585224, accessed 25 March 2023.  

'Regina Kucas', Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/239782753/regina-kucas, accessed 25 March 2023.

Siliunas, Victoria, 2023, personal communication, 17 April.

Šulaitis, Edvardas, 'Dar Viena Skaudi Netektis, Atsisveikinta Su A. A. Viktoru Kuču' (Another Painful Loss, Goodbye Said to Viktoras Kučas RIP), Draugas (Chicago, IL), 20 August 2008, p 8, https://www.draugas.org/key/2008_reg/2008-08-20-DRAUGASo.pdf.

'Viktoras Kucas', Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/239782738/viktoras-kucas, accessed 25 March 2023. 

'Victor Kuciauskas, in the California, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists, 1882-1959', Ancestry.com, accessed 31 March 2023.

'Victor Kuciauskas, in the Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S., Arriving and Departing Passenger and Crew Lists, 1900-1959', Ancestry.com, accessed 31 March 2023.

'Viktoras Kuciauskas, in the Illinois, U.S., Federal Naturalization Records, 1856-1991' Ancestry.com, accessed 31 March 2023.

'X-ray unit', Advocate (Burnie, Tas), 20 October 1954, p 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article69880102, accessed 25 March 2023.