Canberra Brickworks, by Ann Tündern-Smith

The Commonwealth Employment Service in the Bonegilla camp sent 5 men to the Department of Works and Housing in Canberra on 3 August 1948. All of them had been working at the Bonegilla camp until late July, 3 after first picking fruit.

We have met the Zilinskas brothers, Juozas and Jurgis, already. The others sent to Canberra were 2 Lithuanians, Vladas Akumbakas and Bronius Narkauskas, and a Latvian, Eriks Tumsevics.

Given that we know from other evidence that the Zilinskas brothers actually were employed initially by the Department as labourers at the Canberra Brickworks, this destination might have applied to the other 3 as well.

However, at least one of them, Vladas Akumbakas, was sent instead to the newly opened roofing tile factory of the Monier company in The Causeway,  now part of Canberra's Kingston suburb.

Bronius Narkauskas had married an Estonian, Helmi Savest, in the camp on 24 July 1948, only 25 days after her arrival in Australia on the Fifth Transport, the Svalbard. Either this was a whirlwind romance or they had known each other in Germany before Bronius left. Regardless, Helmi was the sixth member of the 3 August party.

This entry will concentrate on the Canberra Brickworks, to which at least two of the party of 6 were sent.  They had opened in 1916 to produce materials for the building of the new national capital. Their location was chosen because it is right beside a good deposit of shale, necessary for the type of brick produced.   There was plenty of the other major ingredient, clay, around everywhere:  Canberra gardening is still notorious for the clay soils.

The decision to establish the Brickworks was made around 1913, as part of the earliest plans for Australia's national capital.

The location of the Brickworks relative to other modern Canberra landmarks
Click once on the image to read the labels in a separate page and note that
the Brickworks were connected to the Parliamentary Triangle and the Canberra CBD
by railway lines in the 1920s when the original buildings were going up

Source: (Doma) Brickworks

The Brickworks closed almost immediately after opening because of WWI labour shortages. Reopened in 1921, they produced the red bricks for important early buildings like the Old Parliament House.

Canberra Red bricks can be seen clearly in the foundation of Old Parliament House

Source:  Canberra Tracks

The same architect, James Smith Murdoch, designed the former Hotel Canberra,
now a Hyatt Hotel, as well as the nearby Old Parliament House;
again, Canberra Red bricks serve ornamental as well as structural purposes

Source: Jpatokal, in Wikipedia

They closed again twice more, during the Depression and during the early years of WWII. They reopened in 1944. 

One month before the First Transport men arrived, the Director of Works was complaining that production was dropping off because the men operating the machines were inexperienced. The machines they were using were the only ones of their type in Australia, making spare parts difficult to obtain.

If he had known that he was about to receive a trained and experienced mechanic, one Jurgis Zilinskas, he would have been happier. Jurgis may well have been as happy fiddling around with brick-making machines as with cars or whatever else he was used to working on. There were no more public complaints about the machinery after Jurgis arrived.

The First Transport men might have found initial accommodation at a Brickworks Hostel in Westridge (the older name for what is now Yarralumla). Perhaps the newly marrieds had a room to themselves there too. This hostel is mentioned for the first time in the Canberra Times on 30 December 1947, in terms of additional accommodation being completed there during 1947. 

The company which carried out a heritage study of the site in 2021, GML Heritage, says that a hostel on the south side of the site was completed in 1945.  It may well have obtained this information from Commonwealth Government files yet to be digitised.

Given the Brickworks Hostel's location, building it from bricks rather than the fibro-cement sheets used for WWII military buildings (including those in the Bonegilla camp) ought to have been an option. This is unlikely, given that almost nothing of it survives, but the building or buildings are likely to have stood on brick piers.  At least it would have been more weatherproof accommodation than the tents offered to the very first employees.

Around one year after the Baltic men’s arrival, on 27 June 1949, Australian coal miners went on strike. Since coal was then the only source of electricity, much of industry was affected badly. A report in the Canberra Times of 2 July 1949 said that the brickworks had shut down already.

The Commonwealth Government of the day, which was formed by the Australian Labor Party and led by Ben Chifley, refused to extend unemployment benefits to those thrown out of work by the coal strike, because it classified the stoppage as an illegal industrial dispute. 

This would have hit all of the Baltic men in industrial employment hard, not just the 5 at the Canberra Brickworks. Note also that the period of the strike, from 27 June to 15 August, was in the middle of the Australian winter.

The strike had flow-on effects in Canberra, with builders having to stand down workers because of a shortage of cement, as well as bricks.

By 13 August, it must have been known that the strike was winding up, as an official was reported by the Canberra Times as saying that it probably would be another week before there was sufficient coal available to restart brick production.

On the day that it should have started up, the relevant union and Government officials agreed to the introduction of a bonus scheme, under which workers would be paid extra on the basis of the number of bricks produced.

Nearly 6 weeks later, 30 September 1949, was the date on which the first Displaced Persons’ contracts would end, as decided already by the Minister for Immigration.  By then, of course, for nearly all of them, it was in their own interests to keep working in Australia.

Jurgis Zilinskas, for one, stayed with the Canberra Brickworks but retrained as a bricklayer. His brother, Juozas, found a job which probably meant less physically taxing work and more mental stimulation, as a storeman with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Eriks Tumsevics is buried in the original Canberra Cemetery, now called the Woden Cemetery, so he stayed in Canberra, perhaps at the Brickworks. The other 2 left Canberra as soon as they could. There will be more about them in this blog soon.

By the 1950s, extra kilns were needed to support the growing number of homes for Canberra workers. Presumably, extra labour was needed also but, at the least, Jurgis Zilinskas was in a secure job.

By the 1960s, a greater variety of materials was being used in the construction of homes, office buildings and factories. However, Canberra bricks still were used then to construct such national institutions as the National Library and the Mint.  

At some stage, Canberra Creams were produced also, to build such landmarks as the now Australian Federal Police College on Brisbane Avenue, and the former Canberra Milk building at the junction of Wentworth Avenue with Canberra Avenue.  These were the product of white shale from Attunga Point, now a headland on the south side of Lake Burley Griffin.

The Canberra milk factory, built from Canberra Cream bricks and opened in 1937
is at the centre of this overview

Source:  Colliers via Region Canberra

The year after Jurgis’ death in 1973, it was decided that brick-making operations ought to be relocated away from the residential suburb of Yarralumla, which had developed next to them (and to their windward). It seems that new kilns were not built, as planned, in the northern industrial suburb of Mitchell, with that site now used as a parking lot for the recent light rail service. The original brickworks fired their last bricks in 1976.

The Yarralumla site with all its buildings and a landmark tall chimney still exists, protected by heritage registration. The ACT Heritage Council says of the site that, “Yarralumla Brickworks is of historical value as the first industrial manufacturing facility within the ACT, and for its integral role in providing the base material used in the construction of the early buildings in the National Capital.

“(It) is a relatively intact representative example of large urban brickworks from the early 20th Century, a type that is becoming increasingly rare nationally and internationally. (It comprises) a cultural landscape where the remaining buildings, structures, equipment and landscape features have the ability to demonstrate the evolution of a range of industrial processes associated with brick and clay production-over a 60 year period.

“(It) is of considerable technical value from the presence in the one location of a number of different kiln types: Staffordshire (1915), Hardy-Patent (1927) and Downdraft (1953) kilns, which demonstrate an unusually wide range of firing processes. The Staffordshire kiln is especially significant as the only surviving example of this kiln type in Australia.”

Canberra brick kilns under construction;
given the 1921-35 period when the photographer, William James Mildenhall, was active in Canberra, these would be the 1927 Hardy-Patent kilns

Source:  Discovering Mildenhall's Canberra

The local Residents Association states that no maintenance of the brick manufacturing infrastructure has been undertaken since the Brickworks ceased operation and, since then, the structures have effectively been left derelict for nearly 50 years. It also mentions, though, that in the late 1970s a developer spent over $1 million to repair 2 kilns and ancillary buildings before his company went into provisional liquidation.

This industrial landscape has become the focus of a new housing development, expected to contain 380 homes, so housing more than 1,000 additional residents of Yarralumla. The company which won this contract, Doma, has approval for its Conservation Management Plan and has just started work on preservation and restoration of the Brickworks as I write.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:  I thank members of the Canberra and Region Heritage Researchers (CRHR) who answered my call for advice on the Brickworks with lots of useful leads.  There is more about CRHR on its blog, at https://crhr-cbr.blogspot.com/2025/03/canberra-region-aims.html.  In particular, I thank Mark Butz for pinning down the block in Mitchell originally allocated to a replacement brickworks.

CITE THIS AS:  Tündern-Smith, Ann (2025) 'Canberra Brickworks' https://firsttransport.blogspot.com/2025/08/canberra-brickworks.html

SOURCES

ACT Heritage Council, ‘Entry to the ACT Heritage Register, Heritage Act 2004, 20068. Yarralumla Brickworks’ https://www.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/148517/yarralumla-brickworks-entry-to-the-heritage-register.pdf, accessed 18 August 2025.

Archives ACT, ‘Find of the Month, September 2023’, https://www.archives.act.gov.au/find_of_the_month/2023/september/previous-find-of-the-month, accessed 18 August 2025.

Canberra Times (1947) 'Largest A.C.T. Housing Ou (sic) Since 1941', Canberra, 30 December, p 2 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2733907, accessed 19 August 2025.

Canberra Times (1948) 'Absenteeism Adds To Cost Of Brick Production' Canberra, 2 July, p 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2753672, accessed 19 Aug 2025.

Canberra Times (1949) 'Only 115 Absentees in Building Trades after Holidays', Canberra, 11 January, p 3 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2784775, accessed 19 Aug 2025.

Canberra Times (1949) 'Heavy Losses on Government Hostels in A.C.T.' Canberra, 11 March, p 5 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2793995, accessed 30 August 2025.  

Canberra Times (1949) 'Close-Down Likely in Canberra', Canberra, 2 July, p 4 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2811723, accessed 19 August 2025.

Canberra Times (1949) 'No Government Employees Yet Stood Down', Canberra, 13 July, p 4 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2813324, accessed 26 August 2025.

Doma, ‘Yarralumla Brickworks’ https://domagroup.com.au/residential/yarralumla-brickworks, accessed 17 August 2025.

Doma Group, ‘Brickworks’, https://brickworksyarralumla.com.au/, accessed 18 August 2025.

Find A Grave, 'Eric Tumsevics' https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/230144442/eric-tumsevics, accessed 28 August 2025.

GML Heritage (2021) Canberra Brickworks Precinct, Conservation Management Plan, Vol 1, pp 26, 76 https://www.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/1945872/canberra-brickworks-precinct-conservation-management-plan-2021-volume-1.pdf, accessed 15 September 2025.

GML Heritage (2021) Canberra Brickworks Precinct, Conservation Management Plan, Vol 2 https://www.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/1945880/canberra-brickworks-precinct-conservation-management-plan-2021-volume-2.pdf,  accessed 15 September 2025.

Libraries ACT, ‘Yarralumla Brickworks’ https://www.library.act.gov.au/find/history/frequentlyaskedquestions/Place_Stories/brickworks, accessed 18 August 2025.

Wikipedia, '1949 Australian coal strike' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Australian_coal_strike,  accessed 29 August 2025.

Wikipedia, 'Hotel Canberra', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Canberra, accessed 2 November 2025.

Yarralumla Residents Association Inc, ‘Canberra Brickworks, History, Heritage and Proposed Developments’ https://yarralumlaresidents.org.au/planning-and-development/current/canberra-brickworks, accessed 17 August 2025.