FoLA Public Meeting, Thursday 18 April 2024

Vanagas: Preserving Lobethal’s History; Preserving a Lutheran Relic

Speaker: Andrew Zilm

$5 Donation

Held at Immanuel Lutheran Church, North Adelaide

LIVESTREAM on FoLA YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@friendsoflutheranarchives9644/live

Jonas Vanagas seemed like an interesting character. A New Australian, he came to Lobethal after a long and, at times, threatening route from Lithuania via Denmark and Melbourne in 1949. He worked in the Onkaparinga Woollen Mill and in his spare time began a task, with the help of others, to preserve Lobethal’s history. He put together a self-published, self-bound book of the town’s history and then assembled a collection of items that was the beginning of the Lobethal Archives and Historical Museum (LA&HM). References in articles say he was unassuming but my take from reading his letters was that he was a strong community-minded and a self-assured man. Maybe seen as a strange thing for a New Australian?

Andrew Zilm, a retired Secondary School teacher, was raised in Lobethal. Drawn back to Lobethal for a 50 year football reunion in 2022, he has been recruited to audit, digitise and update the Lobethal Archives & Historical Museum’s display and collection. One cannot avoid learning about Vanagas when doing work in the small museum. Drawing from articles and newspapers from the LA&HM as well as the Lithuanian Archives in St Peters, Jonas Vanagas will again take centre stage.