First arrivals?

The earliest Lithuanians are usually thought of as starting to arrive in Australia towards the end of the nineteenth century, with perhaps one or two convicts or adventurers preceding them in the first half of the 1800s. But what if someone proposed that they were here much earlier, at the very start of Australia's European history, even before settlement, right back in the seventeenth century? You would probably laugh at the suggestion, just as I did, until ...

When I first read Chapter 1 of Luda Popenhagen's Australian Lithuanians titled 'First arrivals: seventeenth to early twentieth centuries' I was intrigued by the story of the Dutch East India Company's expedition to the west coast of Australia in 1696-97 which may have included representatives from Lithuania (pp9-10):

On 29 December 1696, the ship Geelvinck, which had sailed from Amsterdam six months earlier, landed on Rottnest Island, 19 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia. The Dutch Captain Willem de Vlamingh was in command, and his passengers and crew included citizens of Copenhagen, Bremen and ten from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Willem de Vlamingh's ships, with black swans, at the entrance to the Swan River, Western Australia, coloured engraving, derived from an earlier drawing (now lost) from the de Vlamingh expeditions of 1696–97.
By Johannes van Keulen - Het Eyland Amsterdam, held at the National Library of Australia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17870436

Sure, I thought, wishful thinking: what were the chances that any of these 10 might have come from the Lithuanian part of the Commonwealth? (The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was united in a Commonwealth with the Kingdom of Poland from 1569 to 1795.) And what was the source for this claim anyway? All I could readily find was a similar statement, again unattributed, on an Australian government website dealing with Polish immigrants (see link here).

However Dutch history offered a few clues. Holland in the seventeenth century had one of the most powerful fleets in Europe and their ships frequently visited Polish and Lithuanian ports. In addition, by the mid 1600s the Dutch East India Company (often referred to as the VOC) had developed into a huge multinational corporation, with over 50,000 employees and a private army of 10,000. As well as its interests in the New World, the VOC traded extensively in Europe including purchasing grain, timber and furs from Polish and Lithuanian suppliers. Movement of people went hand in hand with the movement of goods, so there certainly seemed some possibility that Lithuanians were employed by the VOC.

Digging a bit deeper I came across a 2012 article in the Polish journal Geographia Polonica by Mariusz Kowalski on 'Immigrants from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Early Stages of European Colonisation of the Cape Colony (1652-1707)' which has a list of soldiers and sailors who served in the VOC's new colony in South Africa. Included in this list were men who were identified as having originated in Klaipeda, Palanga and Plateliai in Lithuania. So there seems to be evidence that Lithuanians were employed by the VOC. If they were sent to serve as far afield as South Africa then there is a reasonable probability that they also served on ships heading out to the Dutch East Indies and the western coast of Australia.

The Dutch had been landing on or near the coast of Australia for 80 years before de Vlaming arrived.  In fact his 1696-97 expedition had been despatched as a rescue mission to search for survivors of earlier VOC expeditions. Revisiting Popenhagen's book, I'm no longer so sceptical about her closing thoughts (p10):

One cannot help but wonder about the cultural make-up of the passengers and crew of any earlier vessels that might have landed near Australian soil. What national and ethnic identities might have been represented? Perhaps there were citizens of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on board those ships too?

Arrivals from Scotland

http://www.brill.com/scots-polish-lithuanian
-commonwealth-16th-18th-centuries

Individuals have moved between Scotland and Lithuania since at least the sixteenth century. However it was only from the 1880s that significant numbers of Lithuanians began settling in Scotland. By the first decade of the 20th century there were several thousand Lithuanians living and working in Scottish coal mines and steel mills; the linked article from the BBC (click here) provides some background to their lives and communities. If you have a little more time, the linked educational video from Youtube.com (click here) may be entertaining.

Scottish Lithuanians migrating to Australia generally arrived either immediately before the First World War or during the 1920s. A feature of these migrants was that they tended to arrive in family groups; most had lived in Scotland for several years, in some cases for decades, and many arrived with spouses or children who had been born in Scotland.  Another feature is that many of these migrants had already anglicised or simplified their Lithuanian names. Here are a few examples of their stories.

Naturalisation records from the National Archives tell us about Antoni (Antanas) and Eva (Ieva) ALANSKAS who had arrived in Western Australia in 1912 with their three daughters. The parents had been born in Lithuania and lived in Scotland for 9 years, while the children (Annie Kathleen, Mary Cecelia and Maggie Veronica) had all been born in Glasgow. The family settled at Bellevue, near Perth.

The KAIRAITIS/PETRAITIS family had a somewhat different composition. Two brothers, Petras (Peter) and Vincas (William/Bill) Kairaitis had arrived in New South Wales from Scotland before World War One and settled at Blacktown, near Sydney, where they worked as dairymen. Anna Bauze's memoirs relate that by the 1930s they had been joined by their niece Nelly and her husband George Peters, their nephew Bronius and his wife and children, and their nephew Antanas (Tony) who was single. Bronius and Antanas used the surname PATRICK in Australia in place of the Lithuanian Petraitis.  Nelly, Bronius and Antanas had all arrived in 1928 from Scotland.

Another migration pattern is represented by the JESNER family. Isidor Jesner was a Lithuanian Jew who had left Tsarist Russia in 1904 at the age of 19, arriving in Hobart from Glasgow in 1911. Some time later he established himself in Lygon Street, Carlton (Melbourne) where his younger sister Lena joined him in 1928. Lena was aged 33, unmarried, had lived in Scotland for 17 years, and was initially employed by her brother as a domestic. Records at the National Archives suggest that Isidor also sought to sponsor the immigration of other Jesner family members.

William and Margaret DELADE (Vincas and Magdalena DAILIDE) arrived in Australia in the late 1920s with their daughter Natalie, settling at Dapto, New South Wales, where Vincas found work in the coal mines. As recounted in their published family history (click here for the earlier post), Vincas was born in Suvalkija (Lithuania) but left for Scotland in 1912 at the age of 19. Magdalena, on the other hand, had been born in Scotland to Lithuanian parents in 1898.

In Australia the Delade family were friends with another extended Scottish Lithuanian family - the AUGUSTUS/AUGUSTAITIS family. Pranas (Frank) Augustaitis had been born to Lithuanian parents in Scotland in 1892, reached Australia in 1924, and settled in Redfern, Sydney, with his wife Maggie and two sons. They were joined in Sydney by Frank's sister Bella who was married to Juozas PLAUSINIS/known as Joe MILLER; this family lived at Waterloo with their two sons (source: Anna Bauze's memoirs).