Vladas (Vlad or Wally) Akumbakas (1928-2002), sportsman, dancer, singer, by Daina Pocius and Ann Tündern-Smith

Many of the men who were brought to Australia on the First Transport, the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman, were sent to where they could contribute to the production of materials for houses. It often was timber-cutting but, in the case of Vladas Akumbas, it was rooftile-making followed by a career in carpet manufacture.

Vladas Akumbakas ID photo from his selection papers for migration to Australia

Source:  National Archives of Australia

We have looked at the lives of Juozas and Jurgis Zilinskas, 2 of the 5 men from the First Transport sent to work for the Department of Works and Housing in Canberra on 3 August 1948. Vladas was another of this group but an Alien Registration record shows that he was not directed to the Canberra Brickworks like the Zilinskas brothers. Instead, he was sent to the recently opened Monier factory in The Causeway in Canberra, where machinery to make roof tiles had been installed at the start of the year.

ACT Representative Basketballer, 1949

By November 1948, there were known to be about 70 Lithuanians in Canberra, plus Latvians and Estonians, so the Lithuanian men had started a basketball team, Balts. Vladas was a member. The team was so good that it had won its 5 first matches against locals by more than double the other teams’ score, but a major test came in when it met the visiting senior Sydney YMCA team.

The Sydney team contained 3 former State representatives and was on the hunt for that season’s State title. Despite Balts’ “play (being) the cleverest seen in Canberra” according to the Canberra Times, the Sydney team succeeded when the locals could not.  It won with a score nearly double the Balts.

Vladas continued to play while in Canberra, although sometimes with Balts II team.  He still was good enough to be chosen for an ACT representative team sent to the 1949 NSW country championships.  Fellow researcher and Blogger, Jonas Mockūnas, says that the team did so well it finished second.

Balts basketball team, perhaps in Newcastle:
we think that Vladas is number 10, second from the left

Source:  Canberra Lithuanian Community

While making roofing tiles in Canberra, Vladas lived in the Capital Hill Hostel. The location will be familiar to most Australians as the place where Australia’s permanent Parliament House now sits. Operating roof tile machines was Vladas’ second job in Australia. His first was as kitchenhand in the Bonegilla camp from 15 December 1947 for 7 months. He was one of the men who did not go fruit-picking.

While there, he was a member of the table tennis team called, again, Balts, along with Gunars Berzarrins (whose story we have visited already), Janis Belousovs and someone called Nimrods Miltins who had arrived on the Third Transport. (The Third Transport was the General WM Black, which reached Melbourne on 27 April 1948 with 860 Displaced Persons, that is, refugees.)

Table tennis reports in the Border Morning Mail indicate that various other Bonegilla residents were on the team at various times, perhaps depending on whether playing conflicted with their work schedule. On both occasions when Vladas was reported as playing, he was a partner in a winning doubles combination.

Vladas’ German Heritage

Vladas had German parentage on both sides. His paternal grandfather was an Achenbach. That family name was Lithuanised gradually according to Vladas’ obituarist, JNP, to Achumbachas before Vladas’ father changed it to Akumbakas.

His father, a shoemaker, had started life as Pranas Achumbachas, born on 22 April 1899.  His mother was Emilija Meyer, born on 21 January 1899.  Vladas had been born on 1 September 1928 in Veliuona, on the Nemunas River.  At school, Vladas learnt German as well as Lithuanian.

Vladas had fled the Soviet return to Lithuania with his whole family: both parents and at least 3 of his 4 siblings. In 1947, the family was living in the Watenstedt Displaced Persons camp. Watenstedt is part of the conglomeration of towns and villages which form the city of Salzgitter in Lower Saxony.

That's what he told the Australian interviewers in October 1947.  One source has a contrary account, that his family were among those of German descent assisted out of the Baltic States by the German Government in 1939.

Returning to the Fatherland in 1939

Hitler's Germany ran a Heim ins Reich ("home to the Reich" in English) program from October 1936 for Germans whose families had migrated eastwards in recent or long-ago decades.  Propaganda was used to create a belief in those of German ancestry that they should return to contribute to the fatherland.

The foreign ministers of Germany and the Soviet Union, Ribbentrop and Molotov, signed a secret non-agression pact on 23 August 1939.  Significantly for residents of the Baltic States, Germany ceded to the Soviet Union the right to occupy these countries.  Presumably it was about this time that Germany intensified its efforts to bring Baltic residents of German descent back, as 1939 is the widely used reference year for their departure.

They were not taken to Germany though, but to the recently occupied Poland, where they were likely to find themselves placed on farms which had been seized from their Polish owners.  How they then got from there to Germany when the Soviet Union decided to invade Poland is another story.

After the War, international organisations were set up to organise orderly resettlement of those stranded in Germany because they were unwilling or unable to return to their homelands.  The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was the first, eventually folded into the International Refugee Organisation.

Most of those of German descent who had gotten as far as Poland during 1939–41 were deemed by the international organisations not to be eligible for Displaced Person status.  They were seen as having accepted Nazi citizenship and resettlement privileges voluntarily.

There were case-by-case exceptions though, which might have included the Akumbakas family.  Some who could prove persecution by the Soviets after 1945 or loss of German or Baltic citizenship were recognised as displaced. A few who had never been full Reich citizens or who had been minors during the war were accepted on humanitarian grounds.

When he interviewed at the Buchholz camp for possible settlement in Australia, Vladas’ parents were recorded as his dependents.  That meant that he would not have been one of those moved as a minor during the war.

The only work that he had done in the previous five years was as a lumber worker for the previous six months.

Migration to Australia

A fit young Displaced Person who was willing to undertake heavy labour was an ideal for which the Australian selection team was looking.  On 28 October 1947, Vladas found himself on the First Transport to Australia.  His parents, Pranas and Emilija, with his sister, Marija, 4 years younger than Vladas, also migrated to Australia.  They arrived together on 13 April 1950 on board the General WM Black, the 105th Transport.

Another sister, Ona, with her Latvian husband, Arnolds Dreijalds, had arrived in Adelaide on board the 28th Transport, the Goya, on 2 May 1949.  This was the first time that one of the ships bringing Displaced Persons to Australia under the IRO Mass Scheme had gone directly to Adelaide.  It meant that Pranas, Emilija, and Marija also went to Adelaide one year later to join Ona, rather than staying in their city of arrival, Melbourne.

The youngest member of the family, son Vytautas, made the trip when he too was 19 going on 20, in March 1956 on board the Himalaya. Perhaps the family had left him behind in Germany to continue his education there. Or, see below, perhaps he had arrived first much earlier but returned to Germany.

After Bonegilla

The Alien Registration record still held by the National Archives in Adelaide shows that Vladas was in Melbourne by December 1949.  The card shows 4 different addresses in Melbourne up until August 1951.  The employment details have been left blank.  It is hard to believe that Vladas spent this time unemployed, the alternative being that his Canberra employer, Monier Tile Co, applied to his Melbourne employment too.

Old Folks Home, Magill, an Adelaide suburb, is the next place of employment, with Vladas living in the adjacent suburb of Rostrevor.  He must have decided to try rejoining his family.

The Alien Registration card records that his documents were transferred back to Melbourne in June 1953.  We know from an obituary that he had married a Lithuanian, Genė Karčiauskaitę, in 1952.  At a guess, this was in Melbourne and was one of the reasons why Vladas did not stay in Adelaide.

The marriage produced one daughter in 1953, recorded variously as Diana or Dana. Perhaps, like the lead author of this article, her name actually is Daina.

40 and more years in Melbourne

This seems to be the time when Vladas joined Red Book Carpets, working with this manufacturer for the next 40 years. He rose to the position of supervisor. He even started a company basketball team which won a few evening competitions.

Another reason for returning to Melbourne could have been his involvement in its Lithuanian community.  Vladas became such an active member of the Lithuanian Club that he was made an Honorary Member.  He organised and participated in sports, danced with folk dancers and sang with the choir.  He also had a passion for billiards, donating a table to the Club.

Daina asked followers of the Australian Lithuanian Archive (which she directs) Facebook page what they remembered of Vladas.  They definitely remembered the billiard table donation.  “A lovely gentleman … a good friend of my parents”, one person wrote.   “I remember him as someone with a kind, gentle demeanor.”

Citizens

Vladas’ parents with daughter Ona were the first members of the family to become Australian citizens, on 26 February 1958. Despite his apparently short time in Australia, the youngest, Vytautas, was next, on 28 September 1959. (The publicly available 1956 arrival must have been his second time to Australia, as he must have met the 5 years’ residence requirement before applying.)

Vladas and Genė followed on 13 December 1960.

Back to Adelaide

After his retirement, with his daughter and her family moved to Queensland, he began to feel lonely.  As well, he was living with high blood pressure and experiencing heart problems.  Ona and Marija worried about him, so they asked him to Adelaide again.  This time, in 1999, he moved in with Marija and her husband, Fritz Schmelzle.  Once again, he missed his Melbourne friends and the Club but, this time, there was no going back.

He died in the Royal Adelaide Hospital on 15 August 2002.  His funeral was held one week later, in Adelaide’s St. Casimir's Lithuanian Church, with the priest celebrating Mass in English and preaching in both Lithuanian and English.  His ashes were buried with his parents in the Enfield Cemetery.

Obituaries

Vladas was so special that he merited not just one obituary, but two, both in Tėviškes Aidai.  The first, from the Lithuanian community’s Melbourne District Council, begins with some poetry from J. Mikštas.  This is of note because J. Mikštas was the pen name adopted by another First Transport passenger, Juozas Silainis. It could be translated as

My grave is far from Lithuania,

and none of my friends in the motherland will visit me.

The leaves from my garden's trees will not fall on it –

and larks will not feed in the native fields ...

CITE THIS AS: Pocius, Daina and Tündern-Smith, Ann (2026) 'Vladas (Vlad or Wally) Akumbakas (1928-2002)'.

Vladas' name had not been added to this gravestone when it was photographed in 2017

Source:  Find A Grave

SOURCES

Adelaide Cemetery Authority https://aca.sa.gov.au/aca-records/, accessed 8 January 2026.

Anon (2002) 'Obituary of Vladas (Wally) Akumbakas, 17 August 2002', unpublished obituary held by the Australian Lithuanian Archive, Adelaide.

Australijos Lietuvis (The Australian Lithuanian) (1948) 'Lietuviai Australijoje’, Adelaide, 20 December, p 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article280322550, accessed 30 Aug 2025.

Border Morning Mail (1948) 'Table Tennis', Albury, 10 June, p 12, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263466128, accessed 31 August 2025.

Border Morning Mail (1948) 'Revised Draw', Albury, 1 July, p 11, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263775553 accessed 31 Aug 2025.

Canberra Times (1948) 'Tile Output to Reach 5,000 a Day Next Month', Canberra, 8 January, p 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2734498, accessed 30 Aug 2025.

Canberra Times (1948) 'Balts To Meet Visiting Sydney Basketball Team', (ACT : 1926 - 1995), 26 November, p 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2778013, accessed 30 Aug 2025,

Canberra Times (1949) 'Basketball Games', Canberra, 1 April, p 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2797427, accessed 30 August 2025.

Canberra Times (1949) 'Men's Basketball', Canberra, 9 June, p 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2808185, accessed 30 August 2025.

Canberra Times (1949) 'Men's Basketball', Canberra, 24 June, p 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2810491, accessed 30 August 2025.

Commonwealth of Australia Gazette (1958) 'Certificates Of Naturalization’, Canberra,18 September, p 3097, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article240882136, accessed 30 August 2025.

Commonwealth of Australia Gazette (1960) 'Certificates Of Naturalization’, Canberra, 11 February, p 548, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article241002076, accessed 30 August 2025.

Commonwealth of Australia Gazette (1961) 'Certificates Of Naturalization’, Canberra, 6 April, p 1358, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article241005016, accessed 30 August 2025.

Find a Grave, 'Vladas Akumbakas' https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/158706787/vladas-akumbakas, accessed 5 September 2025.

'JNP' (2002) ‘A † A Vladas Akumbakas’ (‘In Memoriam, Vladas Akumbakas’, in Lithuanian) Tėviškes Aidai (Echoes of the Homeland), Melbourne, 2 October, pp 7-8 https://spauda2.org/teviskes_aidai/archive/2002/2002-10-02-TEVISKES-AIDAI.pdf accessed 1 September 2025.

Melbourno Apylinkės Valdyba (Melbourne District Council) (2002) ‘A † A Vladas Akumbakas’ (‘In Memoriam, Vladas Akumbakas’, in Lithuanian) Tėviškes Aidai (Echoes of the Homeland), Melbourne, 18 September, p 7 https://spauda2.org/teviskes_aidai/archive/2002/2002-09-18-TEVISKES-AIDAI.pdf accessed 1 September 2025.

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, South Australia Branch; D4881, Alien registration cards, alphabetical series (1946-1976); AKUMBAKAS VLADAS, AKUMBAKAS Vladas - Nationality: Lithuanian - Arrived Fremantle per General Stuart Heintzelman 28 November 1947 (1947-1953) recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=8108201, accessed 1 September 2025.

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 (1947-1947); 6, AKUMBAKAS Vladas DOB 1 September 1928 (1947-1947) recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=5005449, accessed 1 September 2025.

National Archives of Australia: Migrant Reception and Training Centre, Bonegilla [Victoria]; A2571, Name Index Cards, Migrants Registration [Bonegilla] (1947-1956); AKUMBAKAS VLADAS, AKUMBAKAS, Vladas : Year of Birth - 1928 : Nationality - LITHUANIAN : Travelled per - GEN. HEINTZELMAN : Number – 406 (1947-1948) recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=203672805, accessed 1 September 2025.

Petraitis, Father Juozas (2002) 'A † A Vladas Akumbakas' (‘In Memoriam, Vladas Akumbakas’, in Lithuanian) Tėviškes Aidai (Echoes of the Homeland), Melbourne, 18 August, p 8

Refugee/Displaced Person Statistical Card, ‘Dreijalds, born Akumbakas, Ona’, 3.1.1 Registration and Care of DPs inside and outside of Camps, Arolsen Archives https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/document/66925788, accessed 31 August 2025.

Šventadienio Balsas – Lietuvių žinios [Sunday Voice  – Lithuanian News] (2002) [No title] Adelaide, 25 August, p 4, held by the Australian Lithuanian Archive, Adelaide.

Wikipedia ‘Salzgitter’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salzgitter, accessed 1 September 2025.

Žilinskas three, by Daina Pocius and Ann Tündern-Smith

Updated 28 August and 2 September 2025.

Green is a common enough family name among English speakers. Its Slavic equivalents include Zelinski, Zelinsky, Zelenskii, Zelenskiy and so on. In recent years, the whole world has become familiar with a Ukrainian version, Zelinskyy.  The Lithuanian equivalent is Žilinskas.

Onomasticians, people who study names, say that this is a toponym, a name derived from a place. The families which carry this name originated in a place which was known for its greenness.

There are over twenty people with the name Žilinskas who came to Australia from Germany after World War II, but only three who arrived on the First Transport. Later arrivals were family units but, in this instance, two men of that name were brothers.

Aleksandras Žilinskas

Aleksandras was named after his father and born on 17 June 1928 in Šiauliai. He was a farmer but recorded as a barber when in Germany, where he had arrived in 1943.  As he would have been only 14 or 15 at the time, it looks like he may have been rounded up from whatever he was doing in Lithuania to provide youthful labour for the Germans.

After the War, he had wanted to return to Lithuania if independent but indicated that he would migrate to Canada as second preference.

Aleksandras Zilinskas' ID photo from his Bonegilla card

Source: National Archives of Australia

Instead, he was part of the First Transport to Australia. He would have been only 15 when he left Lithuania, and no family is indicated in the records. Now aged only 19, he was sent to pick fruit at HE Pickworth’s orchard in the Goulbourn Valley as part of his two-year employment contract. Once the harvest was finished, he returned to Bonegilla on 1 April 1948 and was transferred to Tasmania a week later.

Initially in Tasmania he picked fruit again, maybe apples instead of pears given that Tasmania was renown then for its apples.  He worked for EG Lees for one month before transferring to the  Goliath Portland cement company at Railton from May 1948.

It is reputed that Aleksandras was seeing two girls at one time, which caused some rivalry with the local lads. He was challenged to a fight, which he won. The local policeman needed to intervene when the local boys marched into camp seeking revenge.

That's Aleksandras, second from left, joining others for a smoke before a concert during his time in Railton; left is Endrius Jankus, on the right we have Kazys Vilutis and Vaclovas Kalytis

Source:  Collection of Endrius Jankus

On another occasion Aleksandras wielded a toy pistol after an argument, hitting a local who had to have seven stitches in his head. Aleksandras pleaded guilty to assault and was fined £2, with 2/6 costs.  Given the date when he was before the court, this incident probably occurred when Aleksandras worked for the Hydro Electric Commission in Tasmania’s Central Highlands from 1950 to 1951. Here he most likely helped build dams, power stations or accommodation. 

He then worked at the Electrolytic Zinc Company at Rosebery from 1951 to 1955.

Aleksandras didn’t stay in Tasmania but moved to Queensland in 1956.  The National Archives has a file which records him first making contact with the Department of Immigration in Brisbane in August 1969.  He had applied to become an Australian citizen and was living already with Thelma Daphne Pike, known as Mrs Zilinskas.  He was working as a gardener at the time.

On 23 January 1970, before the long-serving Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Clem Jones, Aleksandras took the oath of allegiance and became an Australian citizen.

After 75 years in Australia, Aleksandras passed away on 1 November 2023, aged a respectable 95.  His ashes are interrred in the Bribie Island Memorial Gardens, Woorim, Moreton Bay Region, Queensland.

Clearly no-one proofread this plaque for Aleksandras' birthplace before it was cast

Source:  Happy Graving on Find A Grave

Juozas Žilinskas

Juozas Žilinskas was said to have been born in 1907 in the Lithuanian village of Jaunai, Kalvarija township, Marijampolė district, into a family of a wealthy farmers. According to his death certificate, his parents were George (probably Jurgis) and Marie (possibly Marija, née Cejinskas, which would be Cejinskaite in Lithuania).

He had five brothers and two sisters. One brother, Jurgis, also came to Australia on the General Stuart Heintzelman.

Juozas studied in Kybartai and Marijampolė. He later studied humanities in Kaunas and continued his studies at the universities of Rome and Paris. He taught at the Marijampolė gymnasium (senior high school) and was the director of the Kybartai gymnasium during the last years of Lithuania’s independence and the German occupation. In exile, he organised and directed the Lithuanian school in his DP camp. By this time, he could speak 8 languages.

He was 40 when he arrived in Australia, although it is suspected he was at least five years older. (The age of 40 had been specified as the maximum for those refugees lucky enough to be selected for the First Transport.)

Juozas Zilinskas' ID photograph from his Bonegilla card

Source:  National Archives of Australia

He was sent to pick fruit at the HE Pickworth orchard on 28 January 1948, returning to the Bonegilla camp on 1 April after 2 months away. The camp administration then employed him as a kitchen hand for more than 3 months, from 6 April to 25 July.

Next, he was sent to Canberra on 3 August to work for the Department of Works and Housing. In practical terms, he was making bricks at the Canberra Brickworks. If he was released from the terms of his two-year employment-where-sent contract at the same time as most others, on 30 September 1949, this would have meant 13 months of more labour for the former senior high school principal.

He remained in Canberra and found employment with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in its stores, where he worked until his death. He had a very good reputation in CSIRO due to his diligence and honesty.

One of Ann’s informants, Estonian Galja Mägi, had come to Australia on the General Stuart Heintzelman too, but on a later voyage which left Naples on 31 March 1949 and reached Melbourne on 20 April (which must have been a record time). She said that Juozas had been the first Baltic refugee to buy his own house in Canberra.

Galja Mägi and her 12-year-old son, Tõnu (later Tony) had lived with Mr and Mrs Zilinskas for the nine months before 20 December 1951, when they had been able to move into their own home. Mrs Mägi’s husband and Tony’s father, Johannes, had preceded them to Australia and was living in Canberra hostels for working men at the same time.

Galja learnt that Juozas was the eldest son in his family, so his father had wanted him to become a priest, as was a custom in those days. Try as he might, he could not commit himself to the priesthood. He nearly had a nervous breakdown over the matter. In the end, he was allowed to leave home and continue to study.

Galja said that Mrs Zilinskas, Wanda, had been a primary school teacher. She had been married before World War II to another teacher, but he had been killed by the Russians. She had fled to Germany with her sister and parents. Her father had died of typhus in one of the Displaced Persons camps. Juozas, who knew her before the War, located her and sponsored her entry to Australia.

Away from his home and work, in the Lithuanian community, Juozas could be seen everywhere and often. He did not neglect a single commemoration or community gathering. He was chairman of the very first committee for the Lithuanian Community in Canberra. From then on, he was on every committee and board.

When Juozas was a little bit over 50 years old, he developed a bad pain in his back. The doctor prescribed tablets for him and told him that he was not to go to work, or even drive, for three weeks. At the end of this time, he went back to the doctor, who wrote him a medical certificate for the period. Juozas took the certificate home and looked up the word the doctor had written for his condition in a medical dictionary. What he found there stopped him in his tracks. The dictionary said, “incurable”.

By this stage, he was having difficulty in reading. There was no nerve specialist in Canberra, only someone who came from Sydney once a month. He did not have anyone with him he could discuss his condition. He spent the evening quietly, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. That night, he did not sleep. We need to understand how much pain he might have been experiencing despite the treatment already received.

The next day he returned to work, in the stores at the CSIRO. The stores contained sodium cyanide among many other chemicals. That day, 5 April 1961, he was found deceased in a CSIRO storeroom about 1.40 pm. The Canberra Police were notified, and the body was taken to Canberra morgue where an autopsy was carried out.

At 2.30 pm, someone turned up at Wanda’s workplace to tell her that her husband was dead. He had poisoned himself in his storeroom and collapsed on the floor. Wanda was so devastated that for six months she could not return home. She spent this time boarding with other couples.

This news of his death shocked not only his wife, other relatives and friends, but the entire Lithuanian community of Canberra and, undoubtedly, the wider Lithuanian community. 

Canberrans and Australians in general would have been shocked by the circumstances also – so much so that Juozas’ death and some others like it are the reason why Australia now has a Telephone Interpreter Service. Had it operated in 1961, Juozas might have had someone with the language and technical skills to connect him to a medical person with whom he could have discussed his situation, day or night.

Juozas was buried in Woden Cemetery, Phillip, Canberra. He was survived by Wanda, who lived another 36 years, until 1997. They had no children.

Juozas' grave

Photograph:  Ann Tündern-Smith

Wanda Zilinskas (left) with a First Transport arrival, Birute Tamulyte Gruzas

Source:  Collection of Birute Tamulyte Gruzas

At the time of his death, Juozas and Wanda had moved from the original house in Ebden Street, Ainslie, up the hill to a home closer to his Black Mountain workplace, in Cockle Street, O’Connor. This very house was celebrated in a book prepared for Canberra’s centenary in 2013 by Tim Reeves and Alan Roberts, 100 Canberra Houses.

The authors wrote that the house had been built in 1960 by a Polish Displaced Person, who had cleared a rocky, hillside block himself and ordered a Women’s Weekly plan from a local department store. He also had built the whole house himself apart from the brickwork and stonework. Perhaps because of Juozas’ recent death, the first buyer was recorded as Wanda Zilinskas, who paid just over £5,000 for it.

This was much to the builder’s satisfaction. However, it also was the home where Wanda could not stay for 6 months after her husband died.

2001 watercolour by an unknown artist of the house in which the Juozas and Wanda Zilinskas
were living at the time of Juozas' death.

Source:  Reeves and Roberts, 100 Canberra Houses

Jurgis Žilinskas

Juozas Žilinskas’ brother Jurgis, was born in 1910, also in the village of Jaunai, Kalvarija township, Marijampole district.

Jurgis finished his studies at the Marijampolė school and the Technical School in Kaunas, from which he graduated as a mechanic.

After the War, he lived in the Hanau displaced persons camp in Germany. The record of his interview with the Australian selection panel records him as one of those to have been “forcibly evacuated by the Germans”.

Jurgis Zilinskas' photograph from his selection documents

Source:  National Archives of Australia

He arrived in Australia on the First Transport in 1947. Like his brother, he left the Bonegilla camp on 28 January 1948 to pick fruit at the HE Pickford orchard. Together they returned to Bonegilla on 1 April, and together they worked as kitchen hands in the camp for 6 weeks until 25 July 1948. Then, together yet again, they set out for Canberra to labour at the Brickworks.

Jurgis is on the far right of the row of 11 Bonegilla camp employees with a 12th in front
Who are the others?  Who took the photograph?  Was it the versatile Gunars Berzarrins?
Source: this copy from the Collection of Galina Vasins Karciauskas; also in the Australian Lithuanian Archives

Like his brother, he was one of the first Lithuanians to settle in Canberra. He also was one of the first to buy a house and he provided assistance to many Lithuanians. He was a supporter of the Canberra Lithuanian Club, of which he served as President in 1954, and participated in many Lithuanian gatherings.

Here he met and married Bronė Rubikaitė. She had arrived in the middle of 1948 on the Svalbard, the Fifth Transport, and been sent from the Bonegilla camp to work as a domestic in the Cooma Hospital in southern New South Wales. As Cooma is some 90 road minutes from Canberra and there was a train service at that time, perhaps she was in Canberra to mix with more fellow Lithuanians.

Jurgis was a passionate chess player, known locally as by the translation into English of his first name, George. Ann has counted 20 reports of his chess competition results in the Canberra Times, so suggests to any readers interested in the detail that they search the National Library’s Trove digitisation service themselves.

In late 1949, he was one of 8 Lithuanians who participated in a New Australians versus the Canberra Chess Club tournament, along with 2 Latvians, a Hungarian, and Estonian geologist, Professor AA Öpik. The New Australians won resoundingly, which probably led to invitations to join the Canberra players, as George played for them later.

He was Canberra’s champion player in 1951.

Jurgis, seated second from left, playing chess

Source:  Australian Lithuanian Archive

Ann has been told that Jurgis was “a bit of a gambler”. He probably gambled with his health because, aged 63, he died suddenly of a heart attack on 3 August 1973. He had been working at the Canberra Brickworks for 25 years at the time of his death although, according to his death certificate, he had risen to the skilled occupation of bricklayer.

His funeral took place at St Christophers Cathedral before the cortège left for the Woden Cemetery. He was buried near his brother Juozas, who had died 8 years earlier.

Jurgis' grave with his wife, Bronė (see below)

Photograph:  Ann Tündern-Smith

A laughing Jurgis, his grave image

Photograph:  Ann Tündern-Smith

Neither of them lived to see the freedom of the Motherland, for which both had yearned.

Bronė was buried besides her husband on 5 June 1996, having died one month earlier. Her mental health must have deteriorated badly in the twenty and more years after her husband’s death. Ann has been told that she used to wander around the local shops talking to herself. Another informant has told of how she was scammed by 2 men who made use of her vulnerable state. As this is Jurgis’ story, the details of his wife’s life are better shared by someone focussed on those who came on the Second Transport.

Bronė also told this informant that she had nothing to do with Juozas or his wife as they did not like her. Juozas’ wife, Wanda, who died after Bronė, on 21 July 1997, is not buried with the others. She chose cremation, so her ashes are stored in the Sister Kenny Wall at Canberra’s Norwood Crematorium.

CITE THIS AS Pocius, Daina and Tündern-Smith, Ann (2025) Želinskas three https://firsttransport.blogspot.com/2025/08/zilinskas-three.html.

Sources

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