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.

Bronislava Jutkutė Umbražiūnas-Amber (1912-2003): Orchid grower who returned to her free homeland, by Rasa Ščevinskienė and Ann Tündern-Smith

Bronė Jutkutė lived a long life, during which she became an orchid grower with the husband she married in Australia. There was turmoil in the middle of it, though, after the Soviet Union invaded her homeland in mid-June 1940, probably until she found her feet in Sydney.

Bronė was already 28 years old when the first of 3 invasions of her homeland occurred in 1940, having been born on 7 February 1912. She was born in Mažeikiai, Žemaitija or Samagotia, a city in northwestern Lithuania, on the Venta River, to Jonas and Ona Jutkus. Ona’s maiden name was Žotkevičiūtė.

From biographies we have published of fellow Samogitians, those of Bronius Šaparas and three men with the Smilgevičius family name, we know that these lowlanders are seen as different in personality and culture by other Lithuanians.

The Arolsen Archives have not digitised any records yet for anyone with the Jutkutė or Jutkus surname. The record of Bronė’s interview with the Australian selection team in Germany, in a file held by the National Archives of Australia, says that she had received the usual 4 years of primary school education. She had attended an agricultural school for an additional 2 years. She was not married, a prerequisite for selection on the First Transport.

There is no information at all on her previous employment although, now aged 35, she probably had been in the Lithuanian and German workforces for 20 or more years.

Bronė Jutkute, from her Bonegilla card

Source:  National Archives of Australia

Brone’s Bonegilla card notes that she was sent to the Hotel Ainslie in Canberra on 22 December 1947. She was expected to work there as a cleaner and a maker of beds, known at the time as a “housemaid”. Her agricultural training and possible work experience in that sector counted for nothing in Australia’s then strongly sex-stratified workforce.

The building once called the Hotel Ainslie still exists at the bottom of a major natural landmark, Mount Ainslie, near the Australian War Memorial. Wikipedia contributors record that “the building now occupied by the (Mercure) hotel was built between 1926-27 (meaning it will be 100 years old next year or the year after) as one of eight hostels designed to provide accommodation for public servants in preparation (for) relocating the Parliament from Melbourne to the new national capital. Following the adverse impact of the Great Depression in 1932, a liquor license was granted to building lessee, Ernest Spendlove. The building was renovated and shortly thereafter re-opened as a public hotel.“

Wikipedia further records that Spendlove sold the hotel in 1950, so he was still the employer when Bronė arrived, together with another Lithuanian woman, Elena Augutis. There were 3 women from the First Transport already working at the Hotel. They were Latvian Birute Pabrants and Maria (Mika) Pimbers, and Estonian Hilda Ramjalg. All were 29 or more years old, except for Mika, who was only 19.

Bronė and Elena had left Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre for the Hotel Ainslie on 22 December 1947. Since Canberra still does not have easy access by train, they may not have arrived until 24 December. The Hotel would have been mostly shut down for Christmas Day, although we presume that some guests stayed and would have expected to be fed, in a festive fashion. Let us hope that the 5 Baltic women were given the time and support to have a celebration on the day also.

With one exception, they probably stayed at the Hotel Ainslie for another Christmas but, like most of the other First Transport refugees, were free to find their own employment after 30 September 1949. (The one exception was Elena Augutis, whose Bonegilla card outlines her special circumstances. We will have more about her later.)

In July 1954, Bronė, using the full form of her first name, Bronislava, placed the advertisements of her intention to apply for Australian citizenship in the two newspapers then required under the Nationality and Citizenship Act, 1948-1953. The National Library’s Trove digitisation service has made available one of them, from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. It records her as then residing at 35 Francis Street, East Sydney. This is only 100 metres from the Central Business District’s Hyde Park, in an area now designated Darlinghurst. Still at that address, she became an Australian citizen on 20 April 1956.

35 Francis Street, East Sydney, now 41 Yurong Street, Darlinghurst
and very renovated

Source:  Google Street View

In June 1957, her name appeared in a list published in the New South Wales Government's Gazette, of people who were owed money by Dunlop Rubber Australia Limited. Bronė must have been working in one of Dunlop's factories and left without collecting the £3/18/7 she was due for her work. The Reserve Bank of Australia says that this amount had the buying power of $152 in 2024, one-sixth of the wage that would be paid now to a similar worker.  (The minimum wage in mid-2024 for a 38-hour week was $915.90)

Nikita Khrushchev had delivered his speech criticising Stalin two months earlier, in a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Communist Party control of people’s lives in the Soviet Union started to loosen up after that. So we find that Elena Staigvilienė from Telšiai is looking for Bronė Jutkutė, daughter of Jonas, born in March 1912, left Lithuania in 1944, in the 17 October 1957 edition of Europos Lietuvis (European Lithuanian). Any attempt like that to contact someone who had left would have led earlier to experiencing life in the colder parts of Siberia.

In May 1962, there was another search, this time from someone who was looking for both Bronė and her sister, Elena Staigvilienė. Now we know why Elena was looking for Bronė 4 years earlier. The second searcher knew that Bronė had lived in Hanau while in Germany and thought that it was likely that she now was Mrs. Šopienė (having married a Mr Sopis). This advertisement was in the Australian-Lithuanian newspaper, Mūsų Pastogė (Our Haven).

Bronė had not married Mr Sopis, while our National Archives records suggest that the only man of that name to enter Australia came much later than what was called officially the IRO Mass Scheme (1947-54). Instead, a November 1961 issue of Tėviškės Aidai (Echoes of the Homeland) tells us that she had become the life partner of one Juozapas Renaška. We know about this because Tėviškės Aidai reports that Juozapas (Joseph in English) had collapsed and died of a heart attack on 30 October, after a hard day’s work. He was only 36 years old at the time. Bronė was just a few months away from her 50th birthday.

Her partner was known to have a congenital heart valve disorder, but doctors still said that he should live easily to be 60. He had not complained of illness or any ailments. He was buried on All Souls' Day, 2 November, at the Rookwood Lithuanian Cemetery. He was not a public man, but a circle of friends and compatriots attended a mournful service and accompanied him and Bronė to the cemetery.

By 1963, Bronė had joined her life to that of Teofilis Umbražiūnas, whose last name is probably a misspelling of Ambražiūnas. Since both were too complicated for most Australians, the couple started to use Amber as well.

This time it seems to have been a marriage, since Teofilis’ sports club, Kovas, with whom he played volleyball, recorded the union in the 14 April 1963 issue of Mūsų Pastogė. Rasa's translation of its notice is, “Longtime club member Teofilis Umbražiūnas and Bronė Jutkutė, who have created a Lithuanian family, are wished much success in their future lives by Sydney Lithuanian Sports Club Kovas". By this time, Bronė was 51 years old.

There appears to be no mention of Teofilis in the Lithuanian-language press before the marriage, especially not that he was an orchid grower, so the two are likely to have taken this up together afterwards. For example, Tėviškės Aidai reported in July 1976 that, at a concert by the Daina choir, the conductor, the accompanist and the singers of duets were presented with bouquets of orchids by the owners of an orchid garden, Bronė and Teofilis Ambražiūnai-Amber.

In 1981, a team of Lithuanian sportspeople was preparing to travel to Chicago for competition. The organisers had many ideas for raising funds for uniforms, fares and overseas expenses. One of them was to establish a group of supporters who had donated at least 100 dollars to the cause. Before the team left, the “centurion” supporters would be awarded a special departure badge, their names would be published and they would be presented at a farewell ball. The first centurion was a former good volleyball player for Kovas, a native of Vilnius, Teofilis Ambražiūnas, who owned an orchid business with his wife.

There are too many other public records of generous donations from Bronė and Teofilis to mention them all here, so the orchid business seems to have been a very profitable one.

Indeed, it may have been so profitable that they decided in 1994 not only to retire, but to retire back to their Lithuanian homeland together. They settled into the city of Klaipėda.

Teofilis died of a heart attack on 24 September 1997. As he was born on 12 November 1922, he was nearly 75 years old, a good age at that time (a little higher than the NSW median of 74.3 years) for a man who had spent more than 40 years of his life in NSW -- but some of it in the privations of World War II.

Teofilis was, however, 10 years younger than his wife, who was now 85 years old. Bronė lasted another 5 to 6 years, dying sometime in 2003 according to the headstone on their grave. They are buried in the Lėbartai cemetery in Klaipėda, together with another person, Konstancija, who is probably Teofilis’ mother.

Surprisingly, while Konstancija bears the married woman’s version of the Umbražiūnas family name, both Bronė and Teofilis have been buried under the Australianised name, Amber.

Bronė rests in peace now in her country of birth, after a life that saw happiness and beauty, as well as upheaval and sadness.

Brone's gravestone

Source:  Cemety

CITE THIS AS:  Ščevinskienė, Rasa and Tündern-Smith, Ann (2025) 'Bronislava Jutkutė Umbražiūnas-Amber (1912-2003):  Orchid grower who returned to her free homeland', https://firsttransport.blogspot.com/2025/11/bronislava-jutkute-umbraziunas-amber-refugee-orchid-grower-who-returned-to-free-homeland.html

SOURCES

Bonegilla Migrant Experience, Bonegilla Identity Card Lookup, ‘Bronislava Jutkute’ https://idcards.bonegilla.org.au/record/203732287, accessed 30 October 2025.

Cemety,‘Bronė Amber (1912-2003)’ (Lėbartai cemetery in Klaipėda) https://cemety.lt/public/deceaseds/1596597?type=deceased, accessed 1 November 2025.

Commonwealth of Australia Gazette (1956) ‘Certificates of Naturalization’ Canberra, 20 September, p 2862 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/232988815/25126342, accessed 30 October 2025.

Daily Telegraph (1954) ‘ Public notices’ Sydney, NSW, 5 July, p 25 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/248935087, accessed 29 October 2025.

Elektroninio archyvo informacinė Sistema (Electronic Archive Information System, in Lithuanian with some English) ‘Viekšnių dekanato gimimo metrikų knyga’ (‘Birth register book of churches in the Viekšniai deanery’, in Lithuanian ) (1912, Mažeikiai church, page 40, baptism record number 15, Bronislava Jutkute https://eais.archyvai.lt/repo-ext-api/share/?manifest=https://eais.archyvai.lt/repo-ext-api/view/267310872/300725240/lt/iiif/manifest&lang=lt&page=40, accessed 1 November 2025.

Europos lietuvis (European Lithuanian) (1957) ‘Paieškojimai’ (‘Searches’, in Lithuanian), London, England, 17 October, p 4 https://spauda2.org/britanijos_europos_lietuvis/archive/1957/1957-10-17-EUROPOS-LIETUVIS.pdf, accessed 1 November 2025.

Government Gazette of the State of New South Wales (1957) ‘Unclaimed Moneys’ Sydney, NSW, 14 June, p 1841 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/220354404/14355216, accessed 30 October 2025.

Mūsų Pastogė (Our Haven) (1962) ‘Paieškojimai’ (‘Searches’, in Lithuanian), Sydney, NSW, 30 May, page 6 https://www.spauda2.org/musu_pastoge/archive/1962/1962-05-30-MUSU-PASTOGE.pdf, accessed 30 October 2025.

Mūsų Pastogė (Our Haven) (1963) ‘Pranesimai’ (‘Notices, in Lithuanian) Sydney, 14 April, p 4 https://spauda2.org/musu_pastoge/archive/1963/1963-04-17-MUSU-PASTOGE.pdf, accessed 1 November 2025.

Mūsų Pastogė (Our Haven) (1981) ‘Pasirengimai išvykaiį Čikagą, Rėmėjai Šimtininkai’ (‘Preparations for a Trip to Chicago, Centennial Sponsors’, in Lithuanian) Sydney, 26 October, p 7 https://spauda2.org/musu_pastoge/archive/1981/1981-10-26-MUSU-PASTOGE.pdf, accessed 1 November 2025.

Mūsų Pastogė (Our Haven) (1982) ‘Syd. Lietuvių Klubo reikalais‘ (‘Syd. Lithuanian Club Affairs’, in Lithuanian) Sydney, 11 October, p 5 https://spauda2.org/musu_pastoge/archive/1982/1982-10-11-MUSU-PASTOGE.pdf, accessed 1 November 2025.

Mūsų Pastogė (Our Haven) (1997) ‘Mūsų mirusieji, A.a. Teofilius Amber-Umbražiūnas‘ (‘Our Dead, In Memoriam Teofilius Amber-Umbraziūnas, in Lithuanian) Sydney, 15 December, p 7 https://www.spauda2.org/musu_pastoge/archive/1997/1997-12-15-MUSU-PASTOGE.pdf, accessed 1 November 2025.

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National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A11772: Migrant Selection Documents for Displaced Persons who travelled to Australia per General Stuart Heintzelman departing Bremerhaven 30 October 1947 (sic), 1947-1947; 743: JUTKUTE Bronislawa born 20 February 1912; nationality Lithuanian; travelled per GENERAL STUART HEINTZELMAN arriving in Fremantle on 30 October 1947 (sic), 1947-1947 recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=5005907, accessed 1 November 2025.

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Tėviškės Aidai (Echoes of Homeland) (1976) ‘Sydnėjus, Dainos Choro Vakaras‘ (Sydney, Daina Choir Evening‘, in Lithuanian) Melbourne, 24 July, p 3 https://spauda2.org/teviskes_aidai/archive/1976/1976-nr29-TEVISKES-AIDAI.pdf, accessed 1 November 2025.

Wikipedia, 'Mercure Hotel Canberra' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercure_Hotel_Canberra, accessed 1 November 2025.