We have just met Elena Augutis as the fellow Lithuanian who accompanied Bronislava (Bronė) Jutkutė (later Umbražiūnas-Amber) from the Bonegilla camp in northern Victoria to the Hotel Ainslie in Canberra. There we mentioned that Elena Augutis was said to have had ‘special circumstances’. Here we look further at these and her life as a whole.
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| The only photograph we have of Elena, from her Bonegilla card, is so out of focus that Ann has used a Web service, Unblurimage.ai, to improve it a little Source of original: National Archives of Australia |
Pregnant Women
When the 839 First Transport passengers had yet another medical examination, at the Bonegilla camp, at least their third in the migration process, the examining doctor reported that, “Two of the women are pregnant”. One of them was Ann’s mother, pregnant with Ann. Since Ann read that sentence, she has taken a particular interest in the story of the other woman, Elena Kalyvte Augutiene.
We know from several sources that Elena Kalvyte had married Jonas Augutis in Germany in 1947, before she boarded the General Stuart Heintzelman. Probably because she knew that all the Heintzelman passengers were supposed to be single, she appeared before the selection panel using her maiden name.
Jonas follows
Perhaps Jonas applied too, but was rejected for the First Transport. He was not accepted for resettlement in Australia until his application for the Tenth Transport, the Svalbard, which reached Melbourne on 29 June 1948, when his daughter was already one month old. Perhaps it was her imminent birth that finally got him on a ship to Australia. This ship had sailed from Bremerhaven before her birth, on 8 May 1948, but its 52 days (7½ weeks) sailing time was more typical of ships of that era than the fast Generals. His brother, Juozas, 8 years younger than him, came also.
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| Jonas Augutis from his 1948 Bonegilla card Source: National Archives of Australia |
Elena Kalvyte, the mother of the new Australian, was born on 31 August 1917 in Berciškiai village, Šilute district, in Lithuania, to Jurgis Kalvis and the former Ona Kaulickaitė. An American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) Displaced Persons (DP) Registration form completed on 19 July 1945 gives her previous occupation as clerk, her languages spoken, in order of fluency, as German and Lithuanian and her last residence in Lithuania as the city of Pagėgiai.
It is worth noting that her religion is stated to be Evangelical, unlike the vast majority of Lithuanians. Various writers using various sources suggest that around 85 per cent of the population in 1939 were Catholic – they probably would be excluding the more varied Vilnius region, still in Polish hands.
Elena left the Hotel Ainslie in Canberra on 10 or 11 February to return to the Bonegilla camp. By this time she would have been more than five months pregnant. Her pregnancy would have been visible and probably interfering with her work. Nonetheless, as far as officialdom was concerned, both Elena and Ann’s mother had signed a contract to work in Australia in jobs where they were needed for two years (even though the paper they signed said one year only).
Pregnant women work in farm households
The issue was solved, at least until childbirth and perhaps later, with help from the Lutheran Church. Both women were sent from the Bonegilla camp to assist nearby farmer’s wives. In the case of Elena Augutis, it was to a Mr and Mrs RG Molkentin in Jindera, New South Wales.
Jindera is only 25 Km northwest of the north side of Lake Hume; another 7 Km brings the driver to the Bonegilla camp. Or the driver could take the better roads through Wodonga and Albury, then head a few kilometres northwest to Jindera.
Elena’s Bonegilla card records a baby girl’s birth on 23 May 1948 at the Albury District Hospital.
Jonas Augutis' story
We know a lot about the baby girl’s father from an obituary in the Lithuanian-Australian newspaper, Mūsų Pastogė, in 1983.
Former Lieutenant Jonas Augutis of the 6th Regiment of the Lithuanian Army was born on 21 September 1914, almost 3 years before his wife, in the Sadutiškis parish of Utena county. When he finished Utena senior high school, he entered Lithuania’s Military School, graduating with its 17th class to the rank of Junior Lieutenant and joining the 7th Regiment in Klaipėda. Later, he was transferred to the 6th Regiment and served in Pagėgiai, Elena’s last place of residence in Lithuania. In 1938, he was promoted to the rank of Senior Lieutenant.
After the Soviets occupied his country in 1940, he was transferred to the Vilnius garrison with his regiment. As Soviet officials judged him to be unreliable, he was soon arrested and imprisoned in Lukiškės prison in central Vilnius. After the German Army invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the prisoners were transferred to the Vilnius railway station to be taken to Russia. When the Germans bombed the railway station, several wagons were uncoupled, saving some of the prisoners, including Jonas.
During the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941-44, Jonas became the deputy governor of Utena County. On Lithuanian Independence Day, 16 February 1944, General Plechavičius made a radio appeal to the nation for volunteers to fight Soviet-backed partisans. Some 19,500 men responded to the appeal. Amongst them was Jonas, who was sent to fight the partisans in southeastern Lithuania.
When the Germans tried to transform the squad into SS units, Plechavičius resisted, was arrested and sent to the Salaspils concentration camp. His battalion was disbanded with Jonas being sent to Germany and assigned to an aviation unit. When the War ended, Jonas found himself in the American zone of Germany. He lived in a Displaced Persons camp, served in an American labour company and met Elena Kalvaitė.
Jonas goes to Canberra
Finally selected for resettlement in Australia and housed initially in the Bonegilla camp, it is likely that Jonas was able to reunite with Elena and meet his daughter. Two days after his 34th birthday, he was off to Canberra to work for the Department of the Interior, probably as a labourer. Let us hope that his wife and daughter were able to travel with him or join him soon after.
The Department of the Interior was responsible then for all official aspects of life in Canberra, as well as a wide range of other activities, including elections, meteorology, surveying and lands. The range is so wide that it is impossible to tell what Jonas was tasked to do. We know from his obituary that he joined Australia’s Bureau of Statistics after completing his employment contract and stayed there until his retirement in 1979, aged 65, the then compulsory maximum age of employment. (Ann notes that she was working across the road from the Bureau, in the Department of Immigration from 1977, and may well have crossed his path in the local shopping mall.)
In the early 1950s, the couple and their small daughter were living at 3 Ross Street, a short thoroughfare in suburban O’Connor. Given their circumstances, it may well have been built by the Government to rent. The address was confirmed by the Commonwealth Government when a notice of grant of citizenship to the couple was published in the gazette in December 1959.
Jonas appears before a magistrate
When Jonas came the before Canberra Court in June 1955, charged with both assaulting a policeman in the execution of his duty and drink-driving, at least one reporter for both the Queanbeyan Age and Canberra Times chose to describe him incorrectly as resident on the longer, more prominent, Queanbeyan address of Ross Road.
Jonas made counter allegations of having been assaulted by the police after his arrest. Elena gave evidence in support of her husband, one of the occasions when we have a record of the marriage having occurred in 1947.
Police evidence included Augutis having lost his driving licence once before, in November the previous year, while being fined £20 for drink driving. He had applied successfully to have the licence restored on 16 February. This, therefore, was the second occasion in less than a year when he had been found driving erratically when under the influence of alcohol. Still, he only was fined, £35 on the drink driving charge and £20 for assaulting the policeman. He was given 3 months to pay the total of £55, a hefty amount when you consider that its buying power then was equivalent to more than $2,300 in 2024.
Drinking too much alcohol is also on record for a number of the men from the General Stuart Heintzelman. Considering what they, as well as Jonas Augutis, had gone through during World War II, it is no surprise that they were using this approach to deal with what then was seen as, “Forget the past, look to the future”. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (now commonly PTSD) was not recognised until 1980, when it entered the American Psychiatric Association‘s third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) as a result of the behaviour of Vietnam War veterans.
Jonas’ occupation at the time of his 1955 court appearance was still ‘labourer’.
Elena and Jonas' daughter
Elena and Jonas’ daughter started appearing in the local press, the Canberra Times, in September 1958. She attended Turner Primary School and had placed in the Junior High Jump competition at the School’s first athletics carnival. She also won a place in what the School called its Junior Championship. In the following year’s athletics carnival, she also placed in the 75 yards (69 metres) race for 11-year-old girls.
In another crossing paths moment, the sports ground used by the Turner School is across the street from where another First Transport arrival, Valeria Mets, was living. She probably was at work, though, when her friend’s daughter was competing successfully.
Citizenship
Elena and Jonas received Australian citizenship at the same ceremony on 17 June 1959. They were with 54 other recipients, all of whom were given bibles either from the British and Foreign Bible Society or the Roman Catholic Church in Canberra. They would have been an excellent source of reading practice for English language development so long as they were much later versions than the 1611 King James Version still in common use at that time.
Jonas is recorded on his passenger list as Roman Catholic, while we know already that Elena identified as a Protestant. Which version of the bible they accepted, how they reconciled their religious differences or if they even bothered, are unknowns.
What is known is that Elena, newly back in Canberra with a baby, had help from nuns who were associated with Canberra's St Christopher's Cathedral.
Now that Elena and Jonas were Australian citizens, they were required to be on the electoral roll and to vote in elections. Electoral rolls for the period 1961-77 show them still living at Ross Street, with Elena’s occupation shown as cleaner and Jonas (recorded as John) shown as a machine-operator.
Elena, Jonas, their daughter and the Bureau of Statistics
Since John or Jonas spent his life working for the Bureau of Statistics, it is possible that the machine he was operating was a computer.
The citizenship ceremony was shortly after Elena was photographed with someone probably well known to her from some months together in early 1948, identified in the Canberra Times as Miss A Molkentin. They were said to be among visitors at the opening on 26 May of an exhibition of statistical equipment by the Bureau of Census and Statistics, then co-located with the Treasury in Parkes. We would not be surprised if they were staff gathered around for the purpose of a publicity photo, meaning that both Elena and Miss Molketin were employed by the Bureau, now the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (We will add the photograph if we can find a version which is not mostly black.)
At that stage, the Bureau was conducting complete censuses of the Australian population every 7 years. A very useful one for our purposes had been conducted in June 1947, just 5 months before the First Transport arrived. The 1954 census included most of the Eastern European refugees, still known as former Displaced Persons or New Australians. The next was to occur in 1961. However, the Bureau may well have been employing temporary staff, likely to have been female, to prepare punch card records of surveys, for example.
Ann has been told that their daughter also was a good musician. The Canberra Times of 12 July 1962 records her passing the Grade IV examination of the Australian Musical Examination Board, a hint that her parents had been able to afford a piano at home for some time. The next year she passed the 5th Grade examination. In 1965, she passed the 6th Grade examination.
The 1 June 1967 issue of the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette announced her appointment to the Commonwealth Public Service as a Clerk in what then was called the Third Division. She followed her parents into what then was called the Statistician’s Branch of the Department of the Treasury.
This was the first step on the ladder of a public service career and it looks like a step which she might have taken as soon as she finished high school at the end of the previous year. If she wanted further education, the Commonwealth Public Service provided time off for classes and other support.
Her promotion into the position of a Clerk Class 2/3 in the Public Finance and Taxation Section of the Statistician’s Branch was confirmed on 14 January 1971.
The daughter’s Canberra friends were told of her marriage in Canada in June 1976 by an advertisement in the Canberra Times 4 days after the event. We have no idea if there was sufficient money for her parents to fly from Canberra to attend.
A marriage and new life in Canada should have led to a resignation in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, but the search engine for the National Library of Australia’s Trove digitisation service has been unable to find one. Nor can Trove find appointments to the ABS for either John/Jonas or Elena. It is highly likely that they were temporary employees only, able to be left without employment when the Bureau did not need them. This would explain why Elena was prepared to give her occupation as ‘cleaner’.
The parents move; Jonas dies
By the 1980 electoral roll, Elena had moved to a new address, Dexter Street in the Canberra suburb of Cook, but had no occupation, while John was living still at the Ross Street address. It is quite possible that this is a record of John not get around to updating his residence before that electoral roll was finalised. (Newer electoral rolls are not available to the public for privacy reasons, which was not an issue in the 1970s and earlier.)
The family’s next appearance in the press was in April 1983, when Jonas died aged 68. The advertisement indicated that Elena and “John” had 2 granddaughters in Canada. It also tells us that Jonas’ brother, Juozas, who came to Australia with him in June 1948, had left for the United States. There, another Augutis brother, Mikas had settled.
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| An older Jonas Augutis in the photograph accompanying his obituary Source: Mūsų Pastogė |
The advertisement also said that Jonas had died “after a long illness”, often code for cancer. Whether it was cancer or not, Elena probably had devoted herself to care for him throughout, maybe even into his last days.
Jonas’ obituary in Mūsų Pastogė described him as being of an open nature, a keen reader of books, interested in Lithuanian and general history, and someone who subscribed extensively to the Lithuanian press. He was cremated at the Norwood Park Crematorium on April 21 1983. His farewell included a speech on behalf of the Lithuanian returned servicemen’s organisation, Ramovė.
The family donates
Public thanks appeared in a Lithuanian publication for a donation from the Augutis family in 1990, a very generous $100 from Elena. She had donated it to the Independent Lithuania Foundation in Canberra. This was only months after Lithuania had announced its independence from the Soviet Union on March 11, 1990.
The Augutis name previously appeared on a list of donors in 1951, for 10 shillings to the National Fund. The purpose of this fund was assumed known to readers. Ten shillings, the equivalent of $1 in decimal currency, may appear small but was the largest amount a number of donors were giving and corresponds in buying power with more than $25 in 2024.
Elena's last years
In another possible moment of paths crossing, Elena lived in the same suburb as Ann in her later years. They may well have been at the local shops at the same time.
Elena joined Jonas in Norwood Park with a plaque on the same rock after her death on 6 October 1996 aged 79, in Morling Lodge, Canberra’s first aged care home. She did not receive an obituary. We are doing the best that we can here.
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| Augutis plaques, Norwood Park Source: CAMCF on Find a Grave |
SOURCES
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