Petras Viknius (1925-1974)
Cyclone Tracy is remembered still as one of the most devastating weather events to impact Australia. Sixty-six people were killed by it, including a First Transport arrival, Petras Viknius. Petras was been injured badly during the cyclone on Christmas Day 1974, and died 6 days later, the last day of the year. He was aged only 49.
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| Damage caused by Cyclone Tracy in the Darwin suburb of Wagaman: in the foreground, whole houses have been wiped off their elevated foundations Source: National Museum of Australia |
He had been born in Kaunas, Lithuania, on 2 October 1925 and recorded as having “fled from (the) Russian regime” to Germany when being interviewed for resettlement in Australia 22 years later. The interview record shows that he had completed 6 years of elementary schooling, plus 4 years of an apprenticeship to become a motor mechanic.
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| Petras Viknius from his 1947 selection papers for resettlement in Australia Source: National Archives of Australia |
From the Bonegilla camp, he was one of the 64 or 65 men sent to Adelaide to work for South Australia’s Department of Engineering and Water Supply (E&WS) in early January 1948. He seems to have escaped from the group’s Bedford Park camp before his “two-year” work contract was over. In June 1949, he was admitted to hospital after his motorcycle collided with a car in the Adelaide suburb of Thebarton. His address in 2 newspaper reports of the accident was given as Cowandilla Road, Cowandilla, another Adelaide suburb.
Cowandilla Road, Cowandilla, also was the address from which he advertised his urgent need for a flat, rooms or a caravan for a young couple with one child in September 1949. The advertisement appeared in the Southern Cross, a newspaper published by the Catholic Church in South Australia. Presumably Petras was the male of the young couple.
If his contract with the Federal Government to work where sent had ended normally, it would have finished on 30 September 1949. We note that the newspaper reports of his accident describe his occupation as motor mechanic.
It would be nice to think that he had returned to his preferred occupation but, instead, a record card kept by the Adelaide Office of the Department of Immigration suggests that he was employed as a labourer. His employers, with the date of notification of each omitted, were the Highways Department at Murray Bridge, on the border with Victoria, HW & LG Kiswick of the former Adelaide suburb of Grassmere (now part of Kurralta Park), and Hume Steel of neighbouring Keswick.
By July 1950, Petras had moved to Milner Street, Richmond, and was working for R Mitchell and Company. Google Maps suggests that the home address should have been recorded as Milner Road, Richmond.
In August 1951, Petras and his motorcycle had another meeting with the authorities. This time he was arrested for riding it “while so much under the influence of intoxicating liquor as to be incapable of exercising effective control”. In November that year, he was fined £30 with £7/16/- costs and suspended from holding a driver’s licence for nine months for the offence. Another charge, of having driven without due care, was dropped.
Just before the court appearance, in October 1951, Petras had reported that he still was living on Milner Street or Road but his new employer was the Wiles Manufacturing Company of Manchester Street, Mile End. He lived maybe than half a mile (0.8 km) from his workplace.
Since Petras’ occupation at this time was given as Driver, the loss of his licence for 9 months must have had a major effect on his income. It could explain his change of occupation to Tradesman Assistant during January 1952 to November 1954 at Radium Hill, as recorded by Daina Pocius in her Australian Lithuanian History blog.
The Department of Immigration's record card confirms Petras' move to Radium Hill at that time, with a starting date of 29 January 1952.
Radium Hill was Australia’s first uranium mine, worked between 1926 and 1931 on top of some older activity. After the SA Department of Mines commenced further exploration there in 1946, with a town developed, with a population of 1100 to 1200 peaking in the late 1950s. The mine was closed in 1961 and the town was deserted.
Petras' next move was reported as of 13 January 1955. It was to Hume Steel again — but in Hobart. The residential address was reported as being on Orchard Grove, Springfield. The street name and suburb no longer exist, but a Web search tells us that the Hobart suburb was incorporated into West Moonah. The Hume Steel works were not in suburban Hobart, but 30 minutes drive along the Derwent River in New Norfolk.
The commuting time might have been one reason why this interstate transfer did not work. There may well have been personal reasons as well. Petras was back in South Australia only 3 months later or less. This time his workplace was that of W Brown & Sons in Hindmarsh, where his occupation was noted as furnaceman. He was living about 10 km away, on South Terrace, Plympton Park, still involving commuting but perhaps only 18 minutes' drive.
In October 1955, it was back to the courts again, this time to be found guilty of being drunk while driving. This offence was added to the Department of Immigration's record card.
Since this was Australia, the drink driving could be overlooked for a citizenship application. Petras became an Australian citizen on 5 April 1956, so 8 years after he had arrived.
That’s all we know of Petras’ life in Australia until it was ended by Cyclone Tracy striking Darwin, the Northern Territory’s capital city. In addition to killing 66, it injured hundreds and destroyed about 80 per cent of the city. Those who could left the city in its aftermath. In February 1975, the Australian Government established the Darwin Reconstruction Commission, which rebuilt the city in three years. The near-complete destruction of Darwin led to the introduction of improved building codes across Australia.
The plaque on Petras' burial place in Darwin:
the last line is Lithuanian for Rest in Peace
Presumably Petras’ relationship with the mother of one child had ended some time earlier, since it is only his brother in Hobart who gets a mention of the plaque marking his Darwin burial place.
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| The brother in Hobart, Antanas Viknius, in a photo supplied for his selection to migrate to Australia Source: National Archives of Australia |
Antanas Viknius (1918-1997)
The brother in Hobart was Antanas, 7 years older, who also came to Australia on the 1947 voyage of the General Stuart Heintzelman. Born in 1918, he was above the average passenger age of 24, which may be why had had to wait until late January 1948 for his first work assignment in Australia.
We note that Australian documents on Antanas, plus his grave plaque, give his birth year as 1917 or a date of 30 July 1917. The definitive document is a church record in Lithuania, which clearly shows Antanas being born to Antanas Viknius and his wife, Barbora, on 30 July 1918.
Antanas was one of the fruit-picking team sent to Messrs Dundas Simson of Ardmona. He lasted there for more than 2 months, returning to the Bonegilla camp on 10 April. Twelve days later, he was one of the 18 men sent to Railton, Tasmania, to work for the Goliath Portland Cement Company.
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| Antanas looks much more worn and older than his years in this photo taken during October-December 1947 for his Bonegilla card Source: National Archives of Australia |
In From Amber Coast to Apple Isle, Ramūnas Tarvydas reports that their initial accommodation was shared huts in Goliath's single men's camp. The company soon built more huts from timber frames clad in “fibro cement” sheets made by Goliath. A folding iron bed, a mattress and a couple of blankets were provided to each man. Goliath then gave the men wood for making more furniture, but no tools. It eventually gave in on the question of tools, after which Antanas Viknius made the first set of furniture, to be copied by the others.
Thanks to Stephen Niaura, son of Povilas, Ann has a set of what are believed to be notes on the men compiled by Goliath for Ramūnas’ use. They show Antanas as one of 12 men who either “absconded” on a known date or “left of own accord”. Antanas and an Estonian, Endel Uduste, “absconded” on 28 February 1949, perhaps leaving Railton together.
In an earlier entry for this blog on the life of Endrius Jankus, we noted that Ramūnas’ book discusses 5 Lithuanians who decided that they had signed a contract with the Australian Government to work where sent for one year only and were not party to the decision, made while they were sailing to Australia, to change this to 2 years. Ramūnas reports on the 5 Lithuanians who had left Railton early in 1949, to whom presumably Endel Uduste should be added. The Lithuanians are known to have found various new jobs in Melbourne, where they were tracked down by the CES and sent letters directing them to return to Tasmania.
Failure to follow the direction would lead to deportation, the letters said.
Until the National Archives of Australia grants access to the file of papers relating to Antanas’ application to become an Australian citizen, we won’t know the likely details of what happened next. From another file we do know that the date of grant was 3 October 1955, that is nearly 8 years after Antanas' 28 November 1947 arrival.
At the time of the grant, Anatanas was living in Springfield, presumably the Hobart suburb (there now being another Springfield closer to Launceston), but not at the Orchard Grove address given by his brother earlier in 1955. Still, Petras might have boarded with his brother and family during his brief stay in Tasmania.
Antanas gave a sanitised account of his life in Australia to a Lithuanian-American newspaper in 1975, so more than 25 years after the events. At the time, he and a daughter, Barbara, were visiting another brother who had settled in Chicago.
Bronius Aušrotas in Dirva (Field) reported that “after completing a one-year employment contract”, Antanas got a job with a car company in Melbourne. He had to leave that job and return to Hobart, supposedly due to strikes. He remembered his first difficult years of work, including in a paint factory, until he finally learned a little English and got acquainted with the local business and living conditions.
Being talented and knowing those conditions, Antanas dared to start a risky job as a self-employed house builder. Although he had one setback, he did not lose courage and continued in the same line of work. Finally, he had managed to sell one house after another and earned enough not only managed to provide for his future but also saved enough to "throw away" about 8,000 Australian dollars for this trip.
Since Antanas was travelling with his daughter, that future presumably included a family as well.
We saw above the Antanas’ brother in Australia, Petras, had died at the end of the previous year from the injuries he received during Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy. Although Antanas gave his reasons for travelling to America as wishing to visit his brother and friends from Lithuanian days, as well as show another country and way of life to Barbara, perhaps there was an element of doing something about his grief in the timing. He certainly discussed his brother’s accidental death with Bronius.
Another event which doubtless caused some grief but which was omitted for the talk with Bronius was a housefire which Antanas and family experienced in May 1954. During that fire, he lost his previous identity papers, which explains how we know about it on a Department of Immigration, Tasmanian Office, file.
We already have come across the 1933 visit to Lithuania of the founder of the Scouting movement, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, with his wife and a contingent of 650 British Scouts and Guides, when we learned about the life of Viktoras Žeimys. Antanas and a friend he missed from those days, V Bacevičius, now a photographer, were members together of the Darius and Girėnas scout troop in Kaunas. If you do not remember the story of airmen Darius and Girėnas, we have more in the life of Nikodemas Skidzevičius.
During the Baden-Powell visit, Viknius and Bacevičius had been selected to help with the catering. They had so much work to do that they could not escape the field kitchen to mingle with the British visitors. Decades later though, meeting together in the United States, they could reminisce about the day. They could reminisce about how the President of Lithuania, Antanas Smetona, and the founder of Scouting had drunk together at the Palanga airfield the coffee that Viknius and Bacevičius had brewed.
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| Scouts reunite 42 years later: Antanas Viknius (centre) with V Bacevičius from Cleveland OH and S Ilgūnas from Rochester, NY Source: Skautu Aidas |
Photographer Bacevičius recorded another meeting which Antanas had with a friend from 1933, V Kizlaitis. The emotions at this meeting must have been very mixed, since it took place outside the Cleveland, Ohio, premises of the Dirva (Field) newspaper which had been devastated by fire on 30 July 1975. The printing press, other equipment, and extensive historical archives of a periodical founded 60 years earlier, in August 1915, had been completely destroyed.
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| V Kizlaitis with Antanas Viknius in front of the burnt Dirva building, mid-1975 Photographer: V Bacevičius for Darbininkas (Worker) |
Kizlaitis was an employee of the newspaper who lived on the premises, so he too had lost almost everything in the fire. At the time of the fire, Dirva was being published twice a week; we understand that it is still being published on the reduced schedule of twice a month. It did recover from the fire, and we have to hope the V Kizlaitis did also.
Antanas’ Mūsų Pastogė obituary by Steponas Augustavičius, in 1997, discussed his personal life. He had been married already in Lithuania, to Genovaitė Varaneckaitė in April 1939, but his wife and young daughter remained there when he found himself in Germany at the end of WWII.
According to the Dirva interview, Antanas had witnessed the surrender of the German forces to the Allies near Hamburg and found sanctuary in the Hanseatic German town of Buxtehude from 1945 to 1947. This is contrary to what Steponas wrote, but the account from the man himself should be preferred.
Steponas' obituary noted that Antanas had joined the Lithuanian army when he was aged 20. After his period of service, he moved to the army reserve as a non-commissioned officer. During the German occupation of Lithuania, he had worked in the Legion Speer as a truck driver. His employment by the Legion Speer is confirmed by a card now in the Arolsen Archives, which also gives his wife’s address in February 1944.
The Legion Speer was a paramilitary motor transportation corps founded in 1942 and disbanded in September 1944. The drivers and mechanics who were its members were non-German citizens, recruited in occupied Europe. They provided motor vehicle transportation and logistical support for Organisation Todt, a civil and military engineering organisation. While the German word for “death” is “Tod”, in this case, the Organisation Todt was named after its founder, Fritz Todt.
In Germany after the War, he had continued to work as a driver. This time it was for the relief organisation, UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
As Buxtehude was in the British zone of occupied Germany, and Britain had suffered greatly during the War, so that the zone residents were much worse off than those in the American zone, it was no surprise that Antanas grabbed the first opportunity to move on to resettlement during the northern autumn of 1947.
While in Railton, Antanas fell in love with a 19-year-old local, Beverley Best. He knew that his wife and daughter were alive still in Lithuania, so he could not marry her. Instead, Beverley married another Lithuanian from the First Transport sent to Railton, Henrikas Surkevičius.
Meanwhile, Kazys Alseika asked his shipmate, Antanas, to be groomsman when he married Marcia Ina Paul in Hobart on 5 January 1950. The wedding made the social pages of the Hobart Mercury newspaper, on 28 February 1950, under the heading of Some Recent Tasmanian Weddings.
After he found out that Genovaitė had died, Antanas married a Scottish migrant to Australia, with whom he had 2 daughters, Barbara and Katrina.
In the Eiguliai cemetery in Kaunas, Lithuania, the 1957 grave of Barbora Viknienė (born in 1873) bears a handwritten plaque which says that her son, Antanas, is grieving for her. It is clear that Barbara is named after her grandmother.
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The grave of Barbora Viknienė in Kaunas Antanas Viknius in Australia grieves for his mother Source for both photographs: Cemety.lt |
Henrikas Surkevičius died quite early, in 1964, after only 16 years in Australia. We hope to have more about him soon. Antanas’ second wife died also, after which he and Beverley got together again. During this time, he was able to visit Lithuania and his daughter there, Regina, after at least 47 years of separation.
As his health deteriorated, Beverly took care of him. Death came on 9 December 1997. A funeral mass for Antanas in St. Teresa's Church in the Hobart suburb of Moonah was celebrated by Father Terry Bowman. About 40 of Antanas' friends and acquaintances gathered in the church, near the tricolor-draped coffin.
The farewell words were spoken by Ramūnas Tarvydas, the chairman of the Australian Lithuanian Community, Hobart District, whom we have come across already as the author of From Amber Coast to Apple Isle. The mass readings were by Judy Tarvydienė.
After the mass, everyone sang the Lithuanian National Anthem. Antanas was buried in the Hobart Regional Cemetery in Kingston, near several other Lithuanians. Eleven gathered at the grave. Father Terry read the funeral prayers, then all poured a handful of earth onto the coffin. Beverly poured a handful of earth that Antanas had brought back from Lithuania.
Whoever was responsible for the plaque on Antanas’ gravestone seems to have been carried away by his brothers, naming one of them also as Antanas and 2 as Petras. His mother’s name is not spelled in the Lithuanian fashion but instead as Barbara, while the plaque confirms other sources, such as his birth record, that give his father’s name as Antanas. The brother Joseph probably is Juozapas or Juozas for short, the one he visited in Chicago in 1975.
Another inaccuracy on Antanas' elaborate grave plaque
is the wrong year of birth
Source: Julie Henderson & Lacey Milier on Find A Grave
By late 1997, Antanas’ family included not only the 2 daughters and a grandson, Darius, mentioned in his obituary, but also at least one member of the next generation, a great great grandchild.
Omitted was a sister, who got a mention without being named in a March 1989 issue of Tėviškės Aidai (Echoes of the Homeland), when she was visiting from Lithuania.
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