100 Aciu - Vytautas Vencius

Vytautas Vencius

In 1949 after WW2, at the age of 22, Vytautas arrived in Adelaide Australia.

He became separated from his family Lithuania, yet he wanted to keep his precious Lithuanian heritage alive within him.
In 1955, he married and became actively involved with the fledgling Lithuanian community in Adelaide.

He felt a need to help establish and renovate the Lithuanian Catholic Centre and Church at St Peters.  This was a huge property that required extensive renovation and Vytas was there to work and help create the Adelaide Lithuanian Catholic Centre “Taryba Caritas Inc”.

The Catholic Centre has proven to be a focus of his life.

In the early 1970’s, his focus turned to dancing group Zilvinas at the Lithuanian House in Norwood, which was starting to attract many children and teens.   He first joined the Parents Committee and soon took on the role as manager/organiser to ensure the dancing group was running smoothly and more importantly, to keep the young dancers happy!  He organised cool drinks for them during rehearsals break and organised parties, very often in his own home, to keep the dancers together.  These certainly proved to be popular!  He helped the teachers to find interesting dances and went to great lengths to ensure there was music which was mostly live and at one time, a band of musicians! He made sure the dancers looked their best with lovely costumes and good footwear.   

For the dancers to showcase their ability, he organised for Zilvinas to dance at special events within the Lithuanian community in Adelaide, the bi-annual Australia wide Svente, the Folkloric Society events which were numerous and involved many ethnic communities, the pre-Easter show at Barossa and several times on centre stage at the Adelaide Festival Theatre.  At one point, there were 60 dancers! Thanks to Vytautas’ hard, untiring work and drive, Zilvinas indeed was the most popular it had ever been.

Vytautas was a representative for the dancing group with the Good Neighbour Council of Adelaide and then the Folkloric Society.  He was with Zilvinas, in so many capacities, for 20 years.

After Zilvinas, he joined the Adelaide Lithuanian Theatre Group Vaidila.  He started with small roles and quickly progressed to appear in major roles which were often complex, and which he portrayed with great conviction.  

In the meantime, Vytautas was the Treasurer of the Lithuanian Catholic Centre and after 40 years, he recently retired from this position.

With his love for the Lithuanian Catholic Centre in Adelaide and the Adelaide Lithuanian community, Vytautas regularly performs ‘odd jobs’ and ‘fill ins’, even to this day at the age of 90!